EdTribune - Data-Driven Education Journalism

Wisconsin Lost 8,121 Students in a Single Year — and It Wasn't Even the Worst Recent Drop

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The number that flashes brightest in Wisconsin's enrollment data is the one from the pandemic: 25,024 students gone in a single year, 2020-21. That was the crisis everyone saw. What the state is living through now is quieter but nearly as damaging.

Wisconsin lost 8,121 public school students in 2024-25, dropping total enrollment to 805,881. A year earlier, the loss was even steeper: 8,802, the largest non-COVID decline in the state's modern history. Together, the two most recent years erased 16,923 students from public school rosters, approaching the magnitude of the pandemic drop itself when spread across two years instead of one.

Of 441 districts reporting in both years, 282 lost students. Only 154 gained. Five were flat. The decline was not concentrated in one city or one region. It was everywhere.

The acceleration no one predicted

What makes the current moment alarming is not just the size of the losses but how sharply they diverge from the pre-pandemic trajectory.

From 2007 through 2014, Wisconsin averaged a modest loss of just 100 students per year. The state was essentially treading water. Then something shifted. From 2015 through 2019, average annual losses ballooned to 3,472. COVID pushed the single-year figure to 25,024 in 2021.

The expectation, in Wisconsin and nationally, was that enrollment would bounce back as pandemic disruptions faded. It hasn't. From 2022 through 2025, Wisconsin has averaged annual losses of 6,014 students, running 1.7 times faster than the pre-COVID decline rate. The post-COVID years are not a recovery. They are an acceleration.

Where the students disappeared

Milwaukee^↗ accounted for the single largest district loss in 2025, shedding 1,265 students to fall to 65,599. But the pain extended well beyond the state's largest district. Kenosha^↗ lost 404, Waukesha^↗ lost 396, and West Allis-West Milwaukee^↗ lost 323. Mid-size districts that once seemed insulated from decline were not: Appleton Area^↗ dropped 236, West Bend^↗ lost 226, and Eau Claire Area^↗ lost 179.

The few gainers tell their own story. McFarland^↗, which added 282 students, is home to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a statewide online charter whose students have never set foot in the district. Sun Prairie Area^↗, a Madison suburb, added 185 through genuine residential growth. Several charter operators round out the top gainers list: Milwaukee Science Education Consortium (+307), Rocketship Education Wisconsin (+102), and The Lincoln Academy (+101). The traditional districts that actually grew through families moving in can be counted on two hands.

Every grade shrank except 12th

The grade-level breakdown reveals where the pipeline pressure is building. Twelfth grade was the only level to post a meaningful gain in 2025, adding 2,092 students as a large cohort graduated out. That departure was not matched at the entry end: kindergarten lost 797, first grade lost 1,386, and prekindergarten lost 1,689.

Ninth grade recorded the single largest grade-level loss at 1,934, likely reflecting the transition from 8th grade's smaller incoming cohort. Tenth grade lost 1,332, and 11th grade lost 890. The high school levels that had been temporarily buoyed by larger pre-COVID cohorts moving through are now beginning to feel the contraction that elementary schools have absorbed for years.

The two-year compound

The combined 2024-2025 loss of 16,923 students is historically significant. For context, the COVID year erased 25,024 in a single blow. But the two most recent years, without any pandemic, without any single visible disruption, removed two-thirds of that amount through steady attrition.

Several factors are converging. Wisconsin's birth rate has fallen to 59,675 births in 2024, the lowest since before World War II. Each year's kindergarten class is smaller than the last. Meanwhile, the state's four voucher programs now serve more than 60,000 students, and open enrollment transfers move thousands more across district lines at $8,618 per student.

Revenue limits, frozen since 2009 when the legislature eliminated the CPI adjustment factor, have forced districts to rely on referenda to fund basic operations. Voters approved a record 148 school referendum questions in 2024, reflecting the extent to which the normal funding mechanism has broken down. Madison Metropolitan passed $607 million in combined referenda alone.

What the numbers portend

At the current pace, Wisconsin will drop below 800,000 public school students by 2026-27. The Wisconsin Policy Forum has concluded there is "no enrollment recovery in sight," attributing the decline to falling birth rates, migration to private schools and homeschooling, and lasting pandemic effects.

The 2025 cliff is not one event. It is two consecutive years of losses that dwarf anything the state experienced before 2020, delivered without the explanatory cushion of a global health emergency. Wisconsin's public school system is contracting at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago, and the demographic pipeline offers no reason to expect a reversal.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Tacoma's Attendance Recovery Reversed: Chronic Absenteeism Jumped Back to 36%

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For three years, Tacoma^↗ Public Schools was one of Washington's attendance recovery stories. The chronic absenteeism rate dropped from a catastrophic 40.4% in 2021-22 to 37.6%, then 33.9% — a steady, encouraging trajectory that suggested the state's third-largest district was finding its way back.

In 2024-25, that trajectory broke. Tacoma's chronic rate rose to 36.2%, a 2.3-point jump that erased more than a year's worth of progress. Roughly 10,448 of the district's 28,840 students are now chronically absent — 872 more than the year before.

The largest reversal among top districts

The 2.3-point increase is the largest reversal among Washington's 10 biggest school districts. Kent (+1.0 points) and Vancouver (+1.6) also worsened, but Tacoma's reversal is the most significant both in magnitude and because it interrupted what had been consistent progress.

Other large districts continued improving. Spokane^↗ dropped 2.7 points to 29.6%. Evergreen-Clark fell 3.8 points to 34.4%. Puyallup shed 1.1 points. The split among large districts — some still improving, others reversing — suggests that the statewide stall is not a uniform phenomenon but the result of gains in some places being offset by losses in others.

Who got worse

The reversal in Tacoma was broad-based. Every major subgroup saw its chronic rate increase. Hispanic students experienced the largest jump: from 39.6% to 42.8%, a 3.2-point increase. Homeless students rose by the same margin, from 53.0% to 56.2%. Low-income students went from 40.9% to 43.4% (+2.5 points).

White students and Black students saw identical 2.1-point increases, landing at 29.2% and 39.4% respectively. Asian students, typically the lowest-rate racial group, rose from 24.4% to 26.1%.

The across-the-board nature of the reversal suggests this was not driven by a single demographic shock. Whatever caused Tacoma's attendance to worsen, it affected every student group.

Still 12 points above pre-pandemic

Even before the reversal, Tacoma was far from recovered. The district's 2024-25 rate of 36.2% is 12.0 points above the pre-pandemic rate of 24.2% — itself not a low number. Tacoma had elevated chronic absenteeism before COVID, consistently running 7-10 points above the state average through the 2010s.

The pandemic pushed Tacoma from a district with a significant attendance problem to one where more than a third of students miss a month of school. The brief recovery period brought the rate down but never approached the pre-pandemic baseline, and now the direction has reversed.

At the current rate, roughly 10,448 Tacoma students — enough to fill every seat in four large high schools — are missing 18 or more days per year. That represents an educational crisis that compounds year after year: students who are chronically absent in one year are far more likely to be chronically absent the next, and their academic outcomes deteriorate accordingly.

The question of why

Tacoma's reversal does not yet have a clear single cause. The district serves a diverse, relatively high-poverty population — 59% of students are economically disadvantaged — in a mid-size city grappling with housing costs, homelessness, and the ongoing effects of pandemic disruption.

The fact that the reversal was spread across all subgroups argues against a targeted cause like an immigration-related enrollment shift or a change in how one population group engages with school. It is more consistent with a systemic factor: a housing-cost spike that destabilized families, a transportation disruption, a staffing shortage that affected school climate, or simply the exhaustion of the "easy" attendance recoveries.

Vancouver^↗ School District (22,075 students) showed a similar pattern, with its rate rising 1.6 points to 35.8%. Both districts are in regions of Washington where housing costs have risen sharply, and both serve high proportions of low-income families. Whether the housing connection is causal or correlational remains an open question.

Data source

Data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction via waschooldata. Analysis covers 2014-15 through 2024-25. The 2019-20 school year excluded due to COVID-related attendance tracking anomalies.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Virginia's 19% Recovery

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

For 15 consecutive years, Virginia's public schools grew. From 2003-04 through 2017-18, enrollment climbed by 116,921 students, driven by Northern Virginia's suburban expansion and steady immigration. The system peaked at 1,298,012 in fall 2019 (the 2019-20 school year).

Then COVID hit, and 45,260 students vanished in a single year.

Five years later, only 8,749 have come back. That is a 19.3% recovery rate, one of the weakest among large states, leaving Virginia with 1,261,501 students and still 36,511 below its pre-pandemic peak. Three of the last four years have been declines. The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at UVA projects another 36,827 students lost by 2030.

The pandemic did not create Virginia's enrollment problem. It accelerated a transition that was already underway: births had been falling for a decade, the state's school-age population was aging, and the first enrollment dip arrived in 2018-19, a full year before any lockdown. COVID turned a gradual deceleration into an acute crisis, and the recovery that followed has been shallow enough to confirm that much of the loss is permanent.

The growth era and its end

Virginia added students every year from 2003-04 to 2017-18, peaking at gains above 10,000 per year in the mid-2000s. By 2015-16, the annual increase had slowed to fewer than 4,000 students, and in 2018-19, enrollment fell for the first time in the dataset: a modest 2,536-student decline. A brief rebound in 2019-20 (up 7,499) preceded the COVID crash.

The 2020-21 loss of 45,260 students, a 3.5% single-year drop, dwarfs everything else in the 23-year record. One partial recovery year followed (2022-23, up 11,478), then the slide resumed: down 1,339 in 2023-24 and down 608 in 2024-25.

The post-COVID trajectory is not a recovery with occasional dips. It is a plateau that tilts downward. Virginia has now posted five decline years out of the last seven (2018-19, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2023-24, 2024-25). The system is 36,511 students smaller than it was in 2019-20, and the Cooper Center's projection model suggests it will not return to that level during the 2020s.

Where the students went

Three forces are pulling students out of Virginia's public schools at the same time, making the loss structural rather than cyclical.

Fewer children are being born. Virginia's annual births have fallen in 11 of the last 17 years of available data. The 2024 birth total trails the 2007 peak by 14,422 births, a 13.3% decline. Between 2015 and 2022 alone, births in Fairfax County dropped 15%, and in Arlington County^↗ they fell nearly 25%. The Cooper Center estimates Virginia's population under age 10 is 15% smaller than those in their 20s, meaning the pipeline of future kindergartners is significantly narrower than the cohorts currently graduating.

Homeschooling has surged and stayed high. More than 56,000 Virginia students were homeschooled in 2024-25, up from about 38,000 before the pandemic. The number climbed to 66,117 in 2025-26, a 5.3% single-year increase and the highest level ever recorded. Unlike other states that saw homeschooling spike and then revert, Virginia's numbers have ratcheted upward year after year.

Families with means are choosing private schools. Before the pandemic, over 90% of Virginia-born children enrolled in public kindergarten. By fall 2023, that share had dropped to approximately 85%. The shift is most visible in Fairfax County^↗, where the number of private school students roughly doubled from 14,500 in 2019 to 33,500 in 2025, even as the school-age population grew by 9,000 children.

Virginia does not have a voucher or education savings account program. Governor Youngkin's $5,000 ESA proposal was rejected by the General Assembly. But the state's 2022 Lab Schools Act, backed by $100 million in appropriations, has created a growing alternative: 12 approved lab schools with university partnerships, enrolling nearly 4,000 students across 60 divisions, according to VDOE's 2025 annual report to the legislature. These students do not appear in standard enrollment counts.

73% of divisions still below pre-pandemic levels

The statewide 19.3% recovery rate obscures wide variation at the division level. Only 35 of Virginia's 131 divisions (26.7%) have recovered to their pre-COVID enrollment. The other 96 remain below where they stood in fall 2019.

The largest absolute shortfalls concentrate in the state's biggest systems. Fairfax is down 8,371 students from 2019-20 (188,930 to 180,559). Virginia Beach^↗ is down 3,883. Richmond City^↗ is down 3,785. Norfolk^↗ is down 3,005. Newport News^↗ is down 2,722. Together, these five divisions account for nearly 60% of the statewide shortfall.

The divisions that have recovered tend to be suburban and exurban. Stafford County^↗ gained 1,872 students since 2019-20 and sits at an all-time high of 31,992. Chesterfield County^↗ added 1,585. But some apparent recoveries are misleading: Radford City's gain of 1,691 students is almost entirely from its K-12 virtual school program (1,694 students, 50.8% of the division's enrollment), and Giles County's growth is similarly driven by virtual enrollment.

Norfolk's 22-year freefall

Norfolk holds a distinction no other Virginia division approaches: 22 consecutive years of enrollment decline, every single year in the dataset from 2003-04 to 2024-25. The Navy city enrolled 36,745 students in fall 2003 and 26,832 in fall 2024, a loss of 9,913 students (27.0%).

The school board voted in October 2025 to close nine schools through 2034, after consultants found the district had potentially missed $70.6 million in savings by delaying closures between 2018 and 2022.

"Our hands have been forced with this plan...but our kids are resilient." — Norfolk School Board Chair Sarah DiCalogero, WHRO, October 2025

Norfolk is the sharpest example, but 43 of Virginia's 131 divisions (32.8%) are at all-time lows in 2024-25. Virginia Beach (64,823 students, down 15.0% from its 2003-04 peak) and Newport News (25,933) are among the largest divisions at record-low enrollment.

A different state than a decade ago

While total enrollment has flatlined, the composition of Virginia's student body has transformed. White students dropped below 50% of enrollment in 2013-14, making Virginia a majority-minority state more than a decade ago. By 2024-25, white students comprised 43.4% of enrollment, down from 52.1% in 2010-11, a loss of 106,226 students (16.3%).

Hispanic enrollment crossed 20% for the first time in 2024-25, reaching 253,876 students (20.1%), up from 185,064 (14.8%) in 2010-11. The gap between Hispanic and Black enrollment, which stood at 105,348 in 2010-11, has narrowed to 14,794. At recent rates, Hispanic students will overtake Black students as the second-largest group by approximately 2028.

Multiracial students are the fastest-growing category, nearly doubling from 48,759 (3.9%) to 88,633 (7.0%) since 2010-11. Asian enrollment grew 40.3% over the same period, reaching 98,182 (7.8%).

These shifts carry direct operational consequences. The number of students classified as limited English proficient grew 8.5% in just two years (172,900 in 2022-23 to 187,586 in 2024-25), and nearly one in seven Virginia students now qualifies. Two divisions, Manassas City (52.3% LEP) and Manassas Park (50.7%), are now majority-LEP, concentrating demand for bilingual teachers and ESOL programs in communities that are simultaneously growing.

The pipeline is inverting

Virginia now graduates more students than it enrolls as kindergartners, and the gap is widening. In 2024-25, 97,429 students were in 12th grade while only 84,376 were in kindergarten, a K-to-G12 ratio of 86.6. Kindergarten has been smaller than 12th grade for eight consecutive years, since 2017-18.

Kindergarten peaked at 96,935 in 2012-13 and has since fallen 13.0%. Grade 12 just hit a record 97,429 in 2024-25. The system is sending out more students at the top than it is receiving at the bottom, and the imbalance is growing.

This matters for planning because elementary schools are already feeling the squeeze. Elementary enrollment (K-5) peaked at 580,088 in 2014-15 and has fallen to 544,115, a loss of about 36,000. High school enrollment (grades 9-12) peaked only in 2023-24 at 401,324 and has just begun to decline. The pipeline collapse that has been reshaping elementary schools for a decade is now arriving at the secondary level.

The building problem

Virginia's enrollment trajectory is not a mystery. The demographic math points in one direction. The harder problem is what to do with 1,800 school buildings designed for 1.3 million students when the enrollment is heading toward 1.17 million.

Norfolk's nine-school closure plan is the most visible answer, but it will not be the last. Fairfax is losing families to private schools faster than new families move in, and sits on a $14.4 billion capital backlog. Virginia Beach has shed 11,474 students without closing a single building. In the Shenandoah Valley and I-81 corridor, divisions that are simultaneously shrinking and becoming majority-Hispanic need bilingual teachers they cannot recruit and ESOL programs they cannot fund. The data says less about whether the decline will continue than about how many superintendents will be forced to close schools, cut programs, or both before their boards are ready.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Barrington's 7.6%: How Rhode Island's Wealthiest Suburb Keeps Chronic Absence in Single Digits

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

When COVID drove Rhode Island's chronic absenteeism to 34.10% in the 2021-22 school year, Barrington^↗ peaked at 9.46%. Less than one in ten students missed 10% or more of school days — in a year when one in three students statewide did.

By 2023-24, Barrington's rate had fallen further to 7.64%. In 13 consecutive years of data, the district has never crossed 10%. No other district of comparable size in Rhode Island can make that claim.

Every grade level, every year

The consistency extends across grade bands. In 2023-24, Barrington's elementary rate was 5.33%. Its middle school rate was 8.57%. Even high school — where chronic absenteeism statewide runs at 31.22% — was 9.91% in Barrington.

No grade level in Barrington has exceeded the statewide average in any year on record. Even during COVID, when Barrington's high school rate briefly touched 14.65%, it remained below the pre-pandemic statewide average of 19.13%.

Context matters

Barrington is one of Rhode Island's wealthiest communities. Median household income exceeds $120,000. The student population is overwhelmingly white and affluent. The district's 3,258 students attend well-resourced schools in a compact suburban setting where transportation barriers are minimal and parent engagement is high.

None of this diminishes the attendance outcomes. But it limits the transferability of whatever Barrington does differently. The research is clear that chronic absenteeism correlates more strongly with poverty, housing instability, and health access than with any school-level intervention. A district where families have stable housing, reliable transportation, and flexible work schedules will have lower chronic absenteeism regardless of its attendance policies.

What is notable about Barrington is not that its rate is low, but that it stayed low when the pandemic disrupted attendance across every demographic. Affluent suburbs nationally saw chronic absenteeism rates double or triple during COVID. Barrington's went from 5.99% to 9.46% and then came back down. The spike was modest by any standard, and the recovery was swift.

Part of a pattern

Barrington is the largest district in a group of 19 that have been below the state chronic absenteeism average every single year on record. The group includes a mix of suburban and small districts, from Segue Institute^↗ (5.64%) to North Providence^↗ (23.28%).

The group is exclusively non-urban. No gateway city appears on the list. The correlation between community type and sustained low absenteeism is not surprising, but the consistency — not a single year above the state average across 13 years of data — suggests that some districts operate in an attendance environment fundamentally different from the one most Rhode Island students experience.

Barrington's consistency is real. So is the distance between its circumstances and those of the 33,061 chronically absent students elsewhere in Rhode Island. Attendance liaisons and dashboards help at the margins. But in Barrington, regular attendance is the default -- built on housing stability, health access, and economic security that most districts cannot conjure through policy alone.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Philadelphia's Attendance Equity Gap Tripled Since COVID

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Before the pandemic, the gap between Black and white chronic absence rates in Philadelphia was 5.2 percentage points. It was a real disparity, but a contained one. By the 2021-22 school year, it had more than tripled to 17.6 points. Three years later, it sits at 15.6, with 42.1% of Black students chronically absent versus 26.5% of white students. The gap did not triple temporarily. It tripled and stayed.

The numbers behind the gap

Philadelphia's overall chronic absence rate is 38.9% in 2024-25, nearly double the statewide average of 20.4%. But the aggregate obscures a divergence within. White students in Philadelphia have a chronic absence rate of 26.5%. That is high, and it is 9.5 points above the statewide white rate of 17.0%. Black students, at 42.1%, are 13.2 points above the statewide Black rate of 28.9%.

Hispanic students fall in between at 37.6%, also far above the state average for Hispanic students (24.5%). Asian students, at 17.6%, are the closest to their statewide peers.

The gap's timeline tells its own story. In 2018, the Black-white difference was 5.2 percentage points. It widened slightly in 2019 (6.1 pp) and 2020 (7.8 pp). Then COVID hit. When schools fully reopened in 2021-22, the gap exploded to 17.6 points. It narrowed to 13.4 in 2023-24, but jumped back to 15.6 in 2024-25. The recovery, such as it is, has not been shared equally.

Two in five, and the structural roots

The Economy League of Greater Philadelphia documented the attendance collapse in a post-pandemic analysis, finding that Black students' chronic absenteeism rose by 20 percentage points between 2018-19 and 2021-22, from 19% to 39%. Hispanic students saw a 21-point increase. White and Asian students experienced smaller increases.

What makes Philadelphia's gap structural rather than temporary: the district's white rate of 26.5% is itself well above the statewide average. This is not a story of one group doing well and another doing poorly. Both groups are in crisis. The gap exists because Black students face additional barriers that compound the ones affecting all Philadelphia students: transportation instability, housing disruption, exposure to community violence, and the cascading effects of poverty on school engagement.

Economically disadvantaged students in Philadelphia have a rate of 41.4%, nearly identical to the Black rate, reflecting the heavy overlap between racial and economic disadvantage in the district.

Philadelphia against the state

The comparison with statewide rates reveals the scale of Philadelphia's challenge. The district's overall rate of 38.9% is nearly double the state's 20.4%. For Black students, the gap is 13.2 points (42.1% vs. 28.9%). For white students, it is 9.5 points (26.5% vs. 17.0%).

This means the equity gap within Philadelphia (15.6 pp) is larger than the already-widened statewide Black-white gap (11.9 pp). The district has both a higher baseline for all groups and a wider disparity between them.

The one group that closed its gap

English learner students in Philadelphia have a chronic absence rate of 28.4%, well below the district average of 38.9%. This matches a statewide pattern: English learners are the only subgroup whose chronic absence gap has fully closed, falling from 1.0 percentage point above the state average to exactly matching it.

In Philadelphia, the English learner rate actually decreased from 2023 to 2025, moving from 32.5% to 28.4%, a larger improvement than the district as a whole. Language support programs and community engagement with immigrant families may be producing attendance benefits that other intervention strategies have not matched, though Philadelphia has not publicly attributed this improvement to specific programs.

What narrowing would actually require

The Black-white gap in Philadelphia was 5.2 points in 2018. Getting back to that level would require either a 10-point drop in the Black rate (from 42.1% to roughly 32%) or a convergence from both sides. Neither trend is visible in the current data. The gap shrank from 17.6 to 13.4 between 2022 and 2024, then widened back to 15.6 in 2025.

National research has found that the students who experienced the largest pandemic-era attendance increases are the furthest from their pre-pandemic levels, and that in many states, the gaps between these students and their peers have widened rather than narrowed. Philadelphia fits this pattern precisely. The gap exists. Three years of recovery have failed to narrow it. No program currently operating in the district has demonstrated results at the scale the data demands.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

11 of 19 Nevada Counties at All-Time Enrollment Lows

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Eleven of Nevada's 19 traditional county school districts just hit all-time enrollment lows. Together, those 11 account for 95.4% of all traditional public school enrollment in the state. Clark County^↗, at 291,587 students, anchors the list. Washoe County^↗, at 63,655, sits third. Esmeralda County^↗, at 69, finishes it.

The scale varies wildly — Clark's single-year loss of 14,451 students is larger than most Nevada districts' entire enrollment — but the direction does not. From the state's urban core to its emptiest mining counties, traditional public schools are smaller than at any point in the last eight years.

Sixteen of 19 lost students

Of the 19 traditional districts operating in 2025-26, 16 lost students compared to the prior year. Only Nye County (+7), Storey County (+16), and Davidson Academy (+2) gained. The combined year-over-year loss across all traditional districts was 16,176 students, a 3.9% decline in a single year.

Clark County alone lost 14,451 students, a 4.7% drop that accounted for 89.3% of the traditional sector's total loss. But the breadth of decline matters as much as the depth. Douglas County^↗ lost 198 students (-4.0%). Carson City^↗ lost 178 (-2.4%). Elko County^↗ lost 302 (-3.1%). Churchill County lost 139 (-4.2%). Mineral County lost 22 (-4.1%).

Douglas County and Carson City have now declined for seven consecutive years, the longest active streaks in the state. Clark County, Washoe, and Eureka County have each declined four straight years.

Clark County: built for growth, learning contraction

Clark County's enrollment peaked at 335,333 in 2018-19. It has fallen every year since, losing 43,746 students, a 13.0% decline. The 2025-26 drop of 14,451 was the steepest single-year loss in the eight years of available data.

The district projects enrollment will fall further to 282,643 in 2026-27, which would reduce revenue by roughly $50 million. Already, 284 of its 375 schools face budget cuts, and more than 1,200 staff members have been notified their positions may be eliminated or reassigned.

"For decades, we were hiring thousands of educators, and we were just trying to (serve) children, build buildings." -- Superintendent Jhone Ebert, Las Vegas Sun, Feb. 2026

District administrators have pointed to declining birth rates, slower migration to Las Vegas, and growing competition from charter schools and homeschooling. The kindergarten pipeline tells the rest of the story: CCSD's current kindergarten cohort of 17,618 students is nearly 30% smaller than its senior class of 24,505.

The rural squeeze

The fiscal math is punishing for small counties. Under Nevada's Pupil-Centered Funding Plan, dollars follow students on a quarterly basis, meaning revenue can fluctuate mid-year as enrollment shifts.

Elko County now enrolls 9,293 students, down from 10,263 in 2019-20, a 9.5% decline. Its superintendent, Clayton Anderson, told The Nevada Independent the district needs to cut $15 million from a $125 million budget. Enrollment has been falling 3-4% annually, just below the 5% threshold that would trigger state funding protections.

"It made it real tough for us to look at our staff and say, 'Yeah, sorry, we gotta put this towards the ending fund balance.'" -- Clayton Anderson, Elko County superintendent, The Nevada Independent, Feb. 2026

Douglas County has lost 1,111 students since 2019, a 19.0% decline, the steepest proportional loss among mid-sized traditional districts. The county's population is aging rapidly: the average resident's age rose from 41.7 years in 2000 to 52 years in 2020, and more than a quarter of residents are over 65. Housing prices have pushed young families out.

"Douglas County is not an affordable location for young families to relocate." -- Keith Lewis, Douglas County superintendent, Record-Courier, May 2022

Former Humboldt County superintendent Dave Jensen warned that the pattern is unsustainable: "We're going to see more and more school districts become insolvent."

Meanwhile, charters set 21 records

The same year that 11 traditional districts hit all-time lows, 21 charter districts hit all-time highs. Not a single traditional district set a record on the high end.

Charter enrollment grew from 42,333 in 2018-19 to 70,534 in 2025-26, a 66.6% increase. The charter sector's share of total Nevada enrollment nearly doubled, from 8.5% to 14.9%. In the same period, traditional districts lost 53,160 students, an 11.7% decline.

The State Public Charter School Authority now oversees more students than Washoe County, making it the second-largest school system in the state. The largest charter networks, Pinecrest Academy (8,474 students) and Doral Academy (6,442), are both managed by Florida-based Academica. Mater Academy of Nevada has grown 170% since 2018-19, from 1,962 to 5,297 students.

Not all charters are growing. Five charter operators also sit at all-time lows, including Democracy Prep (927 students, down 27.4% from its peak) and Nevada Virtual Charter School (1,402, down 35.9%). The virtual school's decline mirrors a national pattern of pandemic-era virtual enrollments receding.

A structural split

The distinction between charter growth and traditional decline is not simply a matter of one sector poaching from the other, though some of that is occurring. Birth rate declines, housing affordability, and interstate migration patterns affect the total pool of students. Charter expansion adds capacity on top of those demographic forces, concentrating the pain in traditional districts that still carry the fixed costs of buildings, transportation, and specialized services.

The result is a state where the number of districts setting records has never been higher on both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. In 2025-26, among the 61 districts with at least two years of data, 21 are at all-time highs, 16 are at all-time lows, and 24 sit between their extremes.

Nevada is no longer simply growing or shrinking. It is doing both at once, and the Pupil-Centered Funding Plan treats every departing student identically: $9,051 out the door. In Elko, that means superintendent Clayton Anderson is cutting $15 million from a $125 million budget while his mining towns lose families. In Esmeralda, it means six teachers will return to three schoolhouses next fall and count whether the number is still 69.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

33,829 Students Vanished. The Real Loss Came After.

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Part of the Arizona Enrollment Series. Updated weekly.

Between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, Arizona lost 33,829 students, a 3.0% drop that wiped out the previous two years of growth in a single fall. It was the largest year-over-year loss in the state's enrollment data. But the pandemic shock, as severe as it was, is no longer the main story. The 2021-22 school year brought a bounce of 21,075 students that looked like the beginning of recovery. It wasn't. Since that bounce, Arizona has lost another 59,272 students, nearly twice the COVID loss itself. Enrollment now sits at 1,073,531, a level 72,026 students below the 2020 peak and falling at an accelerating rate.

The pandemic did not cause Arizona's enrollment crisis. It revealed one that was already forming and then made it permanent.

The shape of the shock

Arizona's enrollment hit 1,145,557 in 2019-20, the highest level in the available data. One year later it was 1,111,728. The loss of 33,829 students, 3.0% of enrollment, fell hardest on the state's largest traditional districts. Mesa Unified^↗ lost 4,693 students, 7.5% of its total. Deer Valley Unified^↗ lost 3,927, an 11.4% drop. Tucson Unified^↗ lost 3,350. Across the state, 453 of 654 districts reported fewer students.

The losses fell along a clean gradient of size. Eleven districts with 20,000 or more students collectively lost 24,053 students during the COVID year; 44 medium-sized districts lost 22,053. Small districts with 1,000 to 5,000 students actually netted 8,465 new students, as families fled large systems for smaller ones, or as virtual entities classified as small districts absorbed the overflow.

And there was a lot of overflow. Edkey/Sequoia Choice Schools went from 1,110 students to 5,697, a 413% surge. ASU Prep Digital went from 611 to 4,211. PPEP, a Tucson-based alternative education provider, added 4,042 students. Academy of Mathematics and Science South grew from 1,875 to 5,985. In total, a handful of virtual and digital entities absorbed more than 18,000 students during the COVID year.

The bounce that fooled everyone

In 2021-22, enrollment jumped back by 21,075 students, recovering 62.3% of the COVID loss. The Arizona Department of Education credited its "Ready for School AZ" campaign for bringing families back. The headline numbers suggested the worst was over.

It was a false signal. Every year since the bounce has been negative, and the losses have accelerated: -6,920 in 2022-23, then -10,772, then -15,582, then -25,998 in 2025-26. The four post-bounce years together erased 59,272 students, 5.2% of the 2022 total and 75% more than the COVID shock itself.

Most of the virtual entities that surged during COVID gave their gains back. Edkey/Sequoia Choice fell from 5,697 back to 1,375 by 2025-26. Primavera Virtual Academy dropped from 7,030 to 4,483. Arizona Connections Academy went from 3,083 to 1,961. The students who left traditional districts during the pandemic did not simply return to traditional districts after it. Many left the public system entirely.

Where 72,026 students went

The gap between the 2020 peak and current enrollment did not open because of a single cause. At least three forces pulled students out of Arizona's public schools, and they reinforced each other.

The most structurally significant is demographic. Arizona's school-age population peaked in 2021 and is projected to decrease by 40,000 by 2028, according to the Common Sense Institute of Arizona, citing Census Bureau estimates. The children under five in Arizona fell from 455,375 in 2010 to 393,413 in 2022, a 14% decline. Kindergarten enrollment tracks this: Arizona enrolled 81,305 kindergartners in 2019-20, then 66,935 in 2025-26, a 17.7% drop that shows no sign of reversing.

The second force is school choice. Arizona expanded its Empowerment Scholarship Account program to all students in September 2022, and participation surged from 12,127 to 61,689 in a single year, a 409% increase. By January 2026, more than 100,000 students were using ESAs. The Learning Policy Institute found that 71.2% of universal ESA participants had not previously attended public school, meaning the program's primary fiscal effect was adding new state costs rather than transferring existing students. But the remaining 28.8%, roughly 17,700 students when the program hit 61,689 participants, did leave public schools. In Tucson, 3,300 families within TUSD's boundaries use ESAs to attend private schools, according to KGUN9.

The third is homeschooling, which surged nationally during the pandemic and has not fully receded. The Common Sense Institute reported that Arizona homeschooling jumped from roughly 2% to 11% of the student population during the pandemic before settling to approximately 6%.

No single force accounts for the full 72,026-student gap. The demographic decline was happening before the pandemic; school choice accelerated after it; homeschooling surged during it and partially stuck. The pandemic's role was catalytic: it forced families to make active enrollment decisions, and many of them decided not to come back.

78% of districts are still underwater

Of 396 districts that lost students during the COVID year and have data through 2025-26, only 87 (22.0%) have recovered to their 2020 levels. The remaining 309 are still below where they stood before the pandemic. Sixty percent, 236 districts, are now below even their 2021 COVID trough, meaning they have continued losing students every year since the pandemic hit.

None of the state's 10 largest traditional districts have recovered. Mesa Unified has gone from 62,490 in 2020 to 52,975 in 2026, a net loss of 9,515 students (15.2%). Paradise Valley Unified^↗ lost 18.9%. Washington Elementary^↗ lost 19.8%.

The fiscal consequences are landing now. Mesa Public Schools Superintendent Matt Strom told KJZZ in August 2025 that the district's student population had decreased by 3,400 over three years, with projections showing an additional 4,900-student decline over the next three:

"In the last three years, our student population has decreased by nearly 3,400 students. Projections for the next three years show a further decline of approximately 4,900 students." -- KJZZ, August 2025

Mesa eliminated nearly 400 positions in 2024, laid off 42 certified staff and cut 147 district-level positions in early 2025, and announced another 43 cuts in August. The projected budget shortfall runs between $9 million and $18 million. Nearly 90% of the district's budget goes to employee compensation, leaving almost no margin when per-pupil revenue drops.

Tucson Unified faces a similar trajectory: enrollment fell from 45,248 to 39,008 since 2020, and the district is projecting deficits reaching $21 million by fiscal year 2030 without structural changes.

The kindergarten signal

The kindergarten pipeline offers the clearest view of what comes next, and it is not encouraging. Arizona enrolled 81,305 kindergartners in 2019-20. In 2025-26, the number was 66,935, a drop of 14,370 students, 17.7%. The 2022 kindergarten bounce to 78,898 mirrored the overall enrollment bounce, but kindergarten has since fallen every year to its lowest level in the data.

Each kindergarten cohort sets the ceiling for enrollment 12 years downstream. A class of 66,935 kindergartners in 2026 will become a class of roughly 66,000 or fewer seniors in 2038. If the decline continues at its current pace, Arizona's schools could be enrolling fewer than 60,000 kindergartners before the end of the decade, baking in total enrollment losses that compound for more than a decade.

The Common Sense Institute estimated that declining enrollment since 2020 has already reduced funding formula costs by $450 million per year compared to pre-pandemic trends, with cumulative savings exceeding $1.2 billion over four years. For taxpayers, that is a reduction in spending. For districts, it is the gap between the staff they have and the revenue to pay them.

The COVID shock was not the end of anything. It was the starting gun for a structural shift that has already cost 72,026 students. Superintendents who spent 2022 reassuring their boards can now see the trend line clearly enough to stop pretending it will reverse.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Wyoming's Worst Year: 2026 Decline Shatters 26-Year Record

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Wyoming 2025-26 Enrollment.

Wyoming lost 2,483 students in the 2025-26 school year — the largest single-year decline in the state's 26-year enrollment record.

The drop exceeds the COVID-era loss of 1,894 students in 2020-21. It exceeds the early-2000s decline of 2,168 in 2001-02, when the energy sector last bottomed out. Nothing in the modern data matches what happened this year.

At 86,745 students, Wyoming now sits just 3,040 above its all-time low of 83,705, set in 2006. At the current pace of decline, the state will reach a new floor by 2028.

A record that was already falling

The 2025-26 loss didn't arrive from nowhere. Wyoming's enrollment peaked at 94,002 in 2016, and the trajectory since has been a slow-motion descent punctuated by one brief interruption.

The state lost 741 students in 2017, then 285 in 2018. A small uptick of 803 in 2020 — likely pandemic-related families returning to Wyoming's early-reopening schools — masked the underlying trend. Then came the COVID crash of 1,894 in 2021, a flat year in 2022, and an accelerating slide: 352 lost in 2023, 1,343 in 2024, 1,069 in 2025, and now 2,483 in 2026.

The last three years alone have cost Wyoming 4,895 students — more than five percent of its total enrollment.

Forty-one of fifty-one districts shrank

The 2026 decline was not concentrated in one or two cities. Forty-one of Wyoming's 51 districts lost students this year — a loss rate of 80 percent.

Natrona #1^↗ (Casper) led the state with 443 students lost, the third consecutive year of accelerating decline. Laramie #1^↗ (Cheyenne), the state's largest district, lost 367. Sweetwater #1^↗ (Rock Springs) dropped 308. Campbell #1^↗ (Gillette) lost 261.

Together, these four districts — the backbone of Wyoming's enrollment base — shed 1,379 students, accounting for more than half of the statewide loss.

The smaller districts felt the proportional impact even harder. Platte #1^↗ (Wheatland) lost 71 students from an enrollment of just 811 — an 8.1 percent single-year loss. Fremont #1^↗ (Lander) dropped 81, continuing a decline that has cut the district by more than a quarter from its 2001 peak.

Twenty-one districts are now at their lowest enrollment in the entire 26-year data record.

Why 2016, not 2020, is the turning point

The conventional framing for enrollment loss is pandemic-driven — students disappeared when schools closed. But Wyoming's story doesn't fit that template.

The state's true enrollment peak came in 2016, driven by a decade of energy-sector expansion. Coal, natural gas, and oil extraction brought workers and families to Campbell County, Sweetwater County, and the Powder River Basin. From 2006 to 2016, Wyoming added 10,297 students.

Then energy prices collapsed. The families that had arrived for extraction jobs began leaving. COVID accelerated a contraction that was already four years old.

The post-COVID period has been worse than COVID itself. Wyoming lost 1,894 students in the initial pandemic year. In the five years since, it has lost an additional 5,193 — nearly three times as many.

What comes next

The University of Wyoming's economic forecast projects the state's 5-to-19-year-old population declining through 2031. The college-age cohort is projected to fall 23 percent by 2041 — the steepest drop in the Mountain West. Every age group under 44 is expected to shrink.

A March 2025 court ruling found that Wyoming has unconstitutionally underfunded its K-12 schools. The same month, the legislature cut $17.5 million from the recommended $66.3 million school cost adjustment. Wyoming's School Foundation Program ties funding directly to headcount, meaning every lost student is an automatic budget cut in a system the courts have deemed already insufficient.

Laramie #1^↗ has announced plans to close eight elementary schools through 2035 — the most dramatic consolidation in the state's history. Parents sued in December 2024 to halt the plan. A district consolidation bill has been filed in the legislature.

At 86,745 students and falling, Wyoming is 3,040 students from its all-time low. The energy boom that filled classrooms for a decade is over, the families it brought are gone, and the birth rate has not replaced them. The 2025-26 record makes that arithmetic harder to ignore.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Four Vermont Students Still Chronically Absent — And the Recovery Is Stalling

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In a state where 37 supervisory districts serve fewer than 80,000 students, Vermont's Agency of Education can track chronic absenteeism with unusual precision. What the data shows is not reassuring. One in four students missed at least 10% of school in 2023-24. That is down from a 2021-22 peak when the number was closer to two in five. But the pace of improvement collapsed in the second year, and the state's own director of safe and healthy schools told VTDigger the progress is "not nearly at a rate that is meaningful."

Seven years of data, one pattern

Vermont's chronic absenteeism rate stood at 15.1% in 2018-19, the last full pre-pandemic year. It climbed to 17.7% when COVID first disrupted schools, then accelerated — 23.5% in 2020-21, 37.4% in 2021-22. That peak year, 30,223 students were chronically absent out of 80,757 enrolled. More than a third of the state's student body.

Two years of recovery brought the rate down to 24.3% by 2023-24. But the trajectory tells a troubling story. The first year of recovery, 2022-23, delivered a 10.5 percentage point drop. The second year managed 2.6 points. A four-fold deceleration.

The state has recovered 58.7% of the gap between its pre-COVID baseline and its pandemic peak. At the 2023-24 rate of improvement, reaching the pre-COVID 15.1% would take another three to four years. That assumes the current pace holds, which the deceleration pattern makes unlikely.

The count behind the rate

Rates can abstract away the human scale. In 2023-24, 19,273 Vermont students were chronically absent. Before the pandemic, that number was 12,811. The difference — 6,462 students still on the wrong side of the 10% threshold — is roughly the enrollment of 10 to 12 Vermont school buildings.

At the peak in 2021-22, the number hit 30,223. The subsequent recovery cut roughly 11,000 students from the chronically absent count. But removing 11,000 students from chronic absence while still having 6,400 more than pre-COVID means the state eliminated the easiest cases. What remains is likely more entrenched.

District variation is enormous

Vermont's 37 districts with reliable rate data in 2023-24 span a range that would be striking in a state ten times its size. Two districts — Rutland City SD and Winooski SD — have chronic rates above 50%. A majority of their students are chronically absent. At the other extreme, Champlain Valley SD has driven its rate down to 9.9%, less than half the state average.

Ten districts sit above 30%. Twenty-one fall below the state average. The distribution is not bimodal or random — it correlates, as it does nationally, with poverty, community health, and whether a district has invested in attendance infrastructure.

What makes Vermont different

Unlike most states, Vermont funds schools based on Average Daily Membership, not Average Daily Attendance. Districts do not lose per-pupil funding when students miss school. The fiscal incentive to pursue attendance is indirect, flowing through academic outcomes and the costs of intervention rather than immediate budget impact.

Vermont is also implementing a new foundation funding formula under Act 73, set to take effect in 2028-29. The formula provides $15,033 per student with a 102% weight for economically disadvantaged students — an additional $15,334 per qualifying student. For districts where chronic absenteeism concentrates among low-income families, that investment is partly unrealized each day students are absent.

The Agency of Education has proposed statutory changes to overhaul truancy and absenteeism policies, creating consistent statewide definitions and reporting standards. The University of Vermont's "Every Day Counts" initiative has piloted school-healthcare partnerships in four schools.

The math ahead

The 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found one-third of Vermont high school students struggle with poor mental health, with female and LGBTQ+ students reporting significantly higher rates. For students experiencing homelessness, chronic absenteeism rates hover around 60%. These are not conditions that a truancy policy can resolve.

The first year of recovery captured students whose absences were more situational than structural, the ones who needed a push back to normal routines. The second year's deceleration suggests the remaining 24.3% are harder cases: students whose barriers are medical, economic, or psychological.

Vermont has one advantage most states do not. In a system of 37 supervisory districts serving 80,000 students, a superintendent can know which families are struggling before the quarterly data report arrives. Champlain Valley's 9.9% rate suggests that advantage is real. But Rutland City and Winooski, where majorities of students are chronically absent, suggest it is not sufficient on its own.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Houston ISD Hits Its Lowest Point in Two Decades

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Texas 2025-26 Enrollment.

Katy ISD^↗ enrolled 44,212 students in 2005. Houston ISD^↗ enrolled 208,454. The suburban district on Houston's western edge was roughly one-fifth the size of its urban neighbor.

By 2025-26, Katy has grown to 95,295 students, more than doubling in two decades. Houston ISD has fallen to 168,812, its lowest enrollment in at least 22 years and a loss of 39,642 students since 2005, a 19.0% decline. The ratio between the two districts has compressed from five-to-one to less than two-to-one.

That compression tells a story about where Houston-area families are raising their children, and where they are choosing not to.

The acceleration

Houston ISD was already shrinking before the Texas Education Agency took over the district in June 2023, appointing Superintendent Mike Miles to overhaul struggling campuses. But the pace of loss has roughly doubled since.

In the two years before the takeover (2021-2023), the district lost an average of 3,630 students per year. In the three years since (2024-2026), that average has climbed to 6,826 per year. The 2025 and 2026 losses, at 7,564 and 7,227 respectively, are the largest single-year declines in the dataset.

A January 2026 report from the University of Houston's Institute for Education Policy Research & Evaluation documented 13,208 fewer students enrolled in HISD as of 2024-25 compared to 2022-23. The report also found that ninth-grade enrollment fell 15.1% in two years and that the share of students exiting for private education doubled from 4.4% to 8.1%.

"The student and teacher populations in Houston ISD are very different than they were before the takeover." — Toni Templeton, senior research scientist, University of Houston

Whether the takeover caused the acceleration or merely coincided with it is not fully separable in the enrollment data. The district was losing students before Miles arrived. But the UH report noted that the 130 campuses overhauled under Miles's New Education System lost students at roughly five times the rate of non-overhauled campuses: 7% versus 1.5% in a single year.

The suburban donut

The losses at Houston ISD are not disappearing from the metro area. They are redistributing outward.

Seven outer-ring suburban districts, all within commuting distance of Houston's core, collectively added more than 199,000 students since 2005. Katy^↗ alone grew by 51,083 students (+115.5%). Lamar CISD^↗ in Fort Bend County more than tripled, from 18,440 to 48,787 (+164.6%). Tomball ISD^↗ grew from 8,730 to 23,271 (+166.6%). Conroe ISD^↗, anchoring the northern fringe, added 32,500 students (+80.7%).

The inner ring tells a different story. Aldine ISD^↗, directly north of Houston, grew steadily through 2012 but has since reversed course, losing 10,985 students (-17.4%) in just five years since 2021. Pasadena ISD^↗ dropped by 3,159 (-6.7%) since 2005. Alief ISD^↗, on Houston's southwest border, has lost 19.9% of its enrollment over the same period, almost exactly matching Houston ISD's percentage decline.

The pattern is not unique to Houston. Urban-to-suburban enrollment migration is one of the most persistent trends in American public education. But the scale here is unusual: the seven outer-ring districts gained a combined 199,328 students over two decades while Houston ISD and three inner-ring districts (Aldine, Alief, and Pasadena) lost a combined 55,967.

A kindergarten signal

Enrollment trajectories are built at the bottom of the pipeline. Houston ISD's kindergarten enrollment has fallen 30.5% since 2005, from 16,239 to 11,294.

The kindergarten class has dropped every year since 2022, losing roughly 700-800 students per year. In 2026, Houston ISD enrolled 4,945 fewer kindergartners than it did in 2005. Because each kindergarten cohort moves up one grade per year, the current class sizes will determine district enrollment for the next 12 years. A smaller entering class does not recover.

First-grade enrollment follows the same trajectory: 18,176 first-graders in 2005, 12,015 in 2026, a 33.9% decline. The shrinking pipeline means that even if the district stopped losing students to suburban transfers tomorrow, overall enrollment would continue falling for years as larger upper-grade cohorts graduate out and smaller lower-grade cohorts move up.

The demographic undercurrent

Not every group has left Houston ISD at the same rate. Black enrollment has fallen 41.5% since 2005, from 60,577 to 35,461, a loss of 25,116 students. Hispanic enrollment, the district's largest group, has dropped 17.0%, losing 20,869 students.

White enrollment, by contrast, is essentially flat: 18,428 in 2005, 18,092 in 2026, a decline of just 336 students. Asian enrollment has grown 42.0% since 2011 (the first year of expanded race reporting), from 6,254 to 8,881.

The compositional effect is subtle but real. Houston ISD's Black student share has dropped from 29.1% to 21.0%. Hispanic students remain the majority at 60.5%, down slightly from 62.6% in 2012. White and Asian students have grown as shares of a shrinking total, rising from 8.8% and 3.1% (in 2011) to 10.7% and 5.3%.

The instructional programs these demographic groups receive carry different per-pupil costs, and a shift in the student body's composition changes the mix of services a district must provide even when the overall enrollment trend is clear.

Funding follows the students out

Each student who leaves Houston ISD takes per-pupil state funding with them. Texas's basic allotment has been frozen at $6,160 per student since 2019, a figure that has lost roughly 22% of its purchasing power to inflation over that period. For a district that has shed 20,478 students in three years, the enrollment decline represents a substantial reduction in annual state revenue, even before accounting for the formula's weighted allotments for specific student populations.

Houston ISD's 2025-26 budget included $24.9 million in cuts and the elimination of 103 positions, on top of 1,400 central office positions eliminated the previous year. The Houston Landing reported that the enrollment shortfall in 2024-25 alone was expected to reduce funding by at least $50 million, nearly $30 million beyond what the district had budgeted for.

"Since [2019], we've had about a 22% to 23% inflation rate, and this has put an enormous amount of pressure on public schools throughout the state of Texas." — Kevin Brown, Texas Association of School Administrators, ABC13

The funding challenge cuts both ways. Suburban districts absorbing Houston's former students are themselves strained. Katy ISD, despite its growth, faces projected budget shortfalls under the same frozen basic allotment. Growth districts must build schools and hire teachers faster than state revenue arrives. Declining districts must close schools and reduce staff while maintaining fixed costs across half-empty buildings.

What to watch

Houston ISD's kindergarten class is now 30.5% smaller than it was two decades ago. That pipeline determines the district's enrollment ceiling through 2038. Whether the current trajectory flattens or steepens depends on two forces outside the district's direct control: whether the state increases the basic allotment above $6,160, and whether the TEA's takeover produces the kind of academic results that convince families to stay.

The UH report documented that teacher retention dropped to 58.6% and that nearly one in five HISD teachers is now uncertified, up from less than 1% before the takeover. If workforce instability accelerates family departures, the next round of enrollment data could push the district further below the floor it set in 2026.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

How a Small College Built SC's Sixth-Largest School District

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: SC 2025-26 Enrollment.

Erskine College is a 187-year-old liberal arts school in Due West, South Carolina, a town of fewer than 3,000 people. In 2017, it declared itself a charter school authorizer, a move permitted under state law but anticipated by no one in the Legislature. By 2025-26, the Charter Institute at Erskine^↗ enrolls 28,376 students across 28 schools statewide, making it the sixth-largest school district in South Carolina. Two students separate it from Richland 02^↗, the fifth-largest.

Seven years ago, it enrolled 8,450.

A 235.8% Surge, Mostly in One Year

The growth trajectory reveals a critical detail often lost in the headline number. Erskine did not add 19,926 students gradually. In a single year, between 2019-20 and 2020-21, enrollment jumped from 10,003 to 23,750, a gain of 13,747 students, or 137.4%.

That spike coincided with a reorganization of the charter sector. The SC Public Charter School District^↗, the state's original charter authorizer, saw enrollment drop from 20,761 to 15,773 in the same year. Schools moved between authorizers, carrying their students with them. The net effect: Erskine absorbed a substantial share of the existing charter sector rather than growing purely through new enrollment.

Since that reorganization, Erskine has continued to grow, adding 4,626 students from 2021 to 2026, a 19.5% increase over five years. That is real expansion, but it is a different story than 235.8% growth implies. The headline number reflects a structural rearrangement layered on top of genuine enrollment gains.

The Authorizer Landscape

South Carolina's charter sector runs through three operators. Their trajectories are starkly different.

The SC Public Charter School District, established by the Legislature and governed by a state-appointed board, grew steadily from 17,024 in 2015 to 25,873 in 2018. Then it contracted, dropping to 15,773 by 2021 as schools transferred to Erskine. It has since recovered to 22,115, essentially flat over 12 years.

The Limestone Charter Association^↗, authorized by Limestone University, appeared in the data in 2023 with 1,888 students and grew to 8,650 by 2026, a 358.2% increase. But Limestone University closed in May 2025, leaving its 13 schools to find new sponsors. Most transferred to the SC Public Charter School District, carrying roughly $99.4 million in state funding. Limestone's explosive growth curve will end as abruptly as it began.

Combined, the three charter operators enrolled 59,141 students in 2025-26, or 7.5% of South Carolina's total enrollment. In 2015, one operator enrolled 17,024 students, 2.2% of the total. The charter share has more than tripled.

Where the Students Came From

The charter sector gained 30,378 students between 2019 and 2026. Traditional districts lost 22,785 over the same period. The state's total enrollment rose by 7,593, meaning charter growth did not merely absorb the state's overall gains. It exceeded them by a factor of four.

Among traditional districts, 49 of 68 lost students from 2019 to 2026. Sumter 01^↗ lost the most in absolute terms: 3,273 students, a 19.7% decline. Berkeley 01^↗ and Horry 01^↗, two of the state's largest districts, gained 3,135 and 2,907 respectively, but those gains mask a broader contraction across the traditional sector.

It is not possible to determine from enrollment data alone how many of those traditional-district losses represent families choosing charter schools versus families leaving the state, shifting to private schools, or choosing homeschooling. The charter sector's growth and the traditional sector's decline are parallel trends, not necessarily a direct transfer.

How Erskine Became a District

South Carolina law allows institutions of higher education to authorize charter schools. The provision was designed for research universities partnering with laboratory schools. No one anticipated that a small private college would use it to build a statewide network of dozens of schools across multiple counties.

State law allows authorizers to retain 2% of state aid flowing to the schools they sponsor. For Erskine, with 28,376 students, that amounts to roughly $5.6 million per year. The S.C. Legislative Audit Council completed a review in 2025, clearing the institute of favoritism and conflicts of interest but flagging $820,000 in travel spending between 2023 and 2025.

"No one in the Legislature anticipated that a private college would declare itself a charter school authorizer and, having done so, appropriate for itself tax funds to distribute to as many charter schools as it chose to authorize." — The Post and Courier, Dec. 4, 2025

The audit's "all clear" on legal compliance did not quiet critics. Stanford's CREDO, in its 2023 national charter study, found South Carolina charter students underperforming their peers in both reading and math, one of only three states where charter students did not outperform traditional public school students. The state Senate passed a bill in February 2026 creating additional oversight for charter school authorizers.

Erskine's Student Body

Erskine's demographic profile diverges from the state as a whole. The institute's student body is 56.1% white, compared with 45.8% statewide. Black students make up 25.1% of Erskine's enrollment versus 30.0% statewide. Hispanic students: 10.1% versus 14.8%.

The economic profile is closer to the state average: 55.1% of Erskine students are classified as economically disadvantaged, compared with 59.9% statewide. This is not a sector serving exclusively affluent families, though it does skew whiter than the state's public school population as a whole.

The Sixth-Largest District

Greenville 01^↗, the state's largest traditional district at 76,398 students, is nearly three times Erskine's size. But Erskine is larger than 93.1% of South Carolina's traditional districts. It enrolls more students than Aiken 01 (22,742), more than Dorchester 02 (25,716), and more than five of the seven individual Spartanburg districts.

A new funding bill, Senate Bill 774, would require the Department of Education to redirect local revenue per pupil from traditional districts to charter authorizers for each student attending a charter school. The bill would affect 70,000 to 80,000 students statewide. If enacted, it would formalize the financial transfer that charter growth already represents.

What Happens Next

The charter sector is projected to keep growing. Erskine alone plans to add at least eight new schools in the coming academic year, with projections to reach 40,000 students. The Limestone schools that transferred to the SC Public Charter School District will inflate that operator's numbers in future years. The combined charter share could approach 10% within two to three years.

A school building does not get cheaper to heat when 50 students leave. A bus route does not shorten. Per-pupil funding follows departing students, but the superintendent's salary, the bus fleet, and the boiler bill do not scale down. In a state where 49 of 68 traditional districts shrank over the past seven years, charter growth is no longer a policy experiment. It is the second-largest enrollment story in South Carolina.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Cleveland's Collapse: 29 Schools Closing as Enrollment Hits Bottom

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Part of the Ohio Enrollment 2026 series.

Cleveland Municipal^↗ enrolled 32,369 students in 2025-26, the lowest figure in the district's modern records. That number is 6,474 fewer than in 2014-15, a 16.7% decline. By the district's own accounting, the trajectory stretches much further back: enrollment has been cut roughly in half since 2004, when CMSD served approximately 70,000 students. In December, the school board voted 9-0 to close or merge 29 schools and vacate 18 buildings, the largest single restructuring in the district's history.

The closures are not optional. They are an attempt to match a school system built for 70,000 students to a district that now serves fewer than 33,000, while staring down a $150 million deficit over the next three years.

The downward staircase

In the 12 years of data available, Cleveland has declined in nine. The only two upticks were modest: a partial recovery of 888 students in 2016-17, and a post-COVID bounce of 564 in 2021-22. Neither lasted. Since that 2022 bounce, the district has lost 2,980 students in four consecutive years of decline, erasing the recovery and then some.

The COVID year of 2020-21 stands out: 2,111 students disappeared in a single year, a 5.7% drop. But the post-pandemic period has been nearly as destructive in aggregate. The four-year slide from 35,349 to 32,369 represents a loss of 8.4%. After the sharp 1,395-student drop in 2022-23, the next year's decline of just 48 may have suggested stabilization. It did not. Losses of 717 and 820 followed.

Cleveland is now Ohio's third-largest traditional district, behind Columbus City Schools (45,781) and Cincinnati Public Schools (33,213). Cincinnati, notably, has gained 1.7% since 2015. Columbus has lost 9.1%. Cleveland's 16.7% decline is nearly double that of Columbus and stands in sharp contrast to Cincinnati's stability.

Building Brighter Futures, with fewer buildings

The district's consolidation plan, called Building Brighter Futures, reduces PreK-8 schools from 61 to 45 and high schools from 27 to 14. The restructuring is expected to save approximately $30 million annually, primarily through reduced staffing. Eighteen district-owned buildings will close. Five leases will end.

The plan established minimum enrollment thresholds: 450 students for K-8 schools, 500 for high schools. Many Cleveland buildings fell well below those floors. When a school with 200 students occupies a building designed for 600, the per-pupil cost of maintaining that facility becomes unsustainable regardless of instruction quality.

Around 5,000 students will change buildings in fall 2026. As of late February, only 50% of affected students had selected a CMSD school through the district's choice portal, raising the prospect that closures could accelerate the very enrollment losses they were designed to manage.

One in four students receives special education

The most striking shift in Cleveland's student body is not its size but its composition. Special education enrollment has risen from 8,465 students (21.8% of the total) in 2015 to 8,883 (27.4%) in 2026. The absolute count grew by 418 while overall enrollment fell by 6,474. More than one in four CMSD students now receives special education services. Part of this share increase is mechanical: when overall enrollment shrinks faster than special education enrollment, the ratio rises even without more students being identified. But the absolute growth of 418 students, against a backdrop of 6,474 total departures, indicates expanded identification as well.

That ratio has made the consolidation plan especially fraught. The Cleveland Teachers Union described the district's approach to special education placement as "abhorrent", after hundreds of families received letters indicating their children might not transfer to the same school as their peers.

"They received a form letter from the district informing them that their children may not be transferring to their consolidated school with the rest of their peers." — Shari Obrenski, Cleveland Teachers Union President, Ideastream, Dec. 2025

Not every receiving school has the individual resource rooms and specialized classrooms that students' IEPs require. The instructional programs these students receive carry higher per-pupil costs, and concentrating them into fewer buildings could strain both space and staffing at the surviving schools.

Separately, English learner enrollment grew from 3,679 (9.8%) in 2019 to 4,268 (13.2%) in 2026. That growth is tightly linked to the district's rising Hispanic enrollment.

The demographic transformation

Cleveland remains a predominantly Black district, but the proportions are shifting. Black enrollment fell from 25,714 (66.2%) in 2015 to 19,514 (60.3%) in 2026, a loss of 6,200 students. White enrollment dropped from 5,904 (15.2%) to 4,021 (12.4%), down by 1,883. Hispanic enrollment, by contrast, grew from 5,894 (15.2%) to 6,745 (20.8%), a gain of 851 students. Multiracial enrollment rose 43.5%, from 1,044 to 1,498.

The net effect: Black students accounted for roughly 96% of Cleveland's total enrollment loss. Hispanic enrollment growth partially offset that decline but could not overcome it.

Every suburb is losing too

Cleveland's decline is not happening in isolation. Across Cuyahoga County's traditional districts, total enrollment fell from 148,106 to 125,874 between 2015 and 2026, a loss of 22,232 students (15.0%). Cleveland accounts for 29.1% of that county-wide loss.

Every traditional district in the county with more than 500 students lost enrollment over this period. East Cleveland^↗ lost 53.6% of its students, falling from 2,491 to 1,157. Garfield Heights^↗ lost 28.0%. Euclid^↗ lost 23.3%. Affluent suburbs were not spared: Shaker Heights^↗ lost 19.7%, Chagrin Falls^↗ lost 19.9%, Westlake^↗ lost 15.9%.

Only three traditional districts in the county gained any enrollment at all. Strongsville^↗ added six students. Beachwood^↗ grew 9.0%. Warrensville Heights^↗ grew 27.7%, though from a small base of 1,522.

Cuyahoga County lost nearly 44,000 residents between 2013 and 2023, with Cleveland accounting for the largest share. The school enrollment data mirrors that population trajectory almost precisely.

The kindergarten signal

Cleveland enrolled 2,282 kindergartners in 2025-26, down 26.8% from 3,117 in 2014-15. The kindergarten class is the leading indicator of total enrollment five to twelve years out. If current kindergarten cohorts hold, the district's total enrollment will continue falling into the early 2030s even if no additional families leave.

The 2020-21 COVID year cratered kindergarten to 2,251. It partially recovered to 2,750 in 2021-22 but has declined every year since, settling at 2,282 and 2,287 in the last two years. The kindergarten pipeline has essentially flatlined at a level 27% below where it stood a decade ago.

What the closures cannot fix

The $30 million in annual savings from consolidation addresses only a fraction of the $150 million shortfall. The district has acknowledged that additional cuts to central office and administrative costs will be necessary. The deeper structural problem is a per-pupil funding system in which every departing student carries state dollars out the door, while fixed costs in transportation, facilities, and specialized instruction do not shrink proportionally.

The consolidation also carries retention risk. Parents at community meetings expressed frustration with the plan, citing disrupted routines, lost access to small-school settings, and hour-long bus rides to merged buildings.

Only half of affected families had chosen a CMSD school by the February deadline. The other half were still deciding, and some portion will not choose CMSD at all. Around 5,000 students are changing buildings this fall. In a district that lost 820 students last year without any school closures, the consolidation is a bet that fewer, fuller buildings can hold families that empty hallways could not.

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Rochester Has Declined 17 Straight Years

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Part of the New York Enrollment 2026 series.

In 22 years of New York State enrollment data, Rochester^↗ has grown exactly twice: once in 2006, by 238 students, and once in 2009, by 49. Every other year the district shrank. Since that last blip of growth in 2009, Rochester has declined 17 consecutive years, losing 11,757 students, a 35.7% drop that leaves the district at 21,216 in 2025-26.

That 17-year streak stands alone among New York's Big Five upstate cities. Buffalo^↗ lost 9.2% over the same period from 2012 to 2026. Syracuse^↗ lost 8.2%. Yonkers^↗ lost 8.1%. Rochester's 32.4% decline over that same window is more than triple the rate of any peer.

A district built for 37,000 serving 21,000

The scale of Rochester's contraction becomes concrete in its buildings. The district's operating capacity is 37,483 students, according to RCSD's own reconfiguration plan. It enrolled 21,216 in 2025-26. That is 57% utilization, meaning roughly two of every five seats sit empty.

Superintendent Carmine Peluso put the problem in starker terms when he announced the district's reconfiguration plan in 2023:

"Roughly 50% of our children that are born in the city are making their way into our schools," compared to 73% a decade earlier. — WXXI News, Sept. 2023

Half of Rochester's children never enter the district's doors. The board voted in October 2023 to close 11 schools across five buildings, simultaneously establishing new middle schools and consolidating programs. It was the largest reconfiguration in the district's modern history, and enrollment has continued to fall since.

COVID accelerated a trajectory that was already set

Rochester did not need the pandemic to decline. It was losing an average of 603 students per year from 2010 to 2019, a steady erosion driven by demographic contraction and competition from charters and suburban districts. COVID compressed years of loss into months: the district shed 2,017 students in 2020-21 alone, its worst single year.

The post-pandemic years have been worse than what came before. From 2022 to 2026, Rochester averaged 630 students lost per year, slightly above its pre-COVID pace, and the 2022-23 drop of 1,219 was nearly as large as the COVID year itself. The district has lost 3,148 students since its pandemic low, with no year of recovery.

Charters and the urban-suburban pipeline

Rochester-named charter schools enrolled 932 students in 2012. By 2026, that figure reached 4,353 across five entities, led by Rochester Prep CS 1 (1,482 students) and Rochester Academy CS (840). That 3,421-student increase in charter enrollment accounts for roughly a third of the district's 10,146-student loss over the same period. The relationship is not one-to-one; some charter students would not have attended RCSD regardless, and birth rate decline accounts for a share of the loss.

The Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program, which allows Rochester students to attend schools in surrounding suburban districts, provides another exit. The program was designed to reduce racial isolation and deconcentrate poverty, but it also removes students from RCSD's enrollment count and the per-pupil funding that follows them.

Rochester's population itself is contributing to the pipeline. Monroe County lost 1.4% of its residents between April 2020 and July 2023, according to Census estimates, with the city of Rochester declining 1.9% to 207,274 by 2023. A 2024 rebound driven by international migration brought Monroe County's population back to 752,202, but that growth has not yet translated into school enrollment.

The pipeline is inverting

Rochester enrolled 2,392 kindergartners in 2009. By 2026, that number had fallen to 1,459, a 39.0% decline. At the other end, Grade 12 enrollment has risen from 1,807 in 2009 to 1,954 in 2026, an 8.1% increase. The K-to-G12 pipeline has inverted: Rochester now graduates more seniors than it enrolls kindergartners.

Kindergarten hit 1,350 during COVID in 2021, briefly recovered, then fell to a new low of 1,334 in 2024. The 2026 figure of 1,459 represents a modest rebound from that floor but remains 39% below the 2009 level. The pattern reflects both Rochester's falling birth rate and the decisions families continue to make about whether to enter the public system at all.

No peer trajectory compares

Among the Big Five (excluding NYC, which is structured as 32 geographic districts), Rochester's indexed decline since 2009 is in a category of its own. Buffalo, which was actually larger than Rochester in 2012 at 32,709 students, has declined at roughly one-quarter the rate. Syracuse has held relatively flat. Yonkers, which has its own nine-year decline streak, has lost only 4.2% since 2009.

Rochester's trajectory is not merely the worst of the Big Five. It is structurally different: the other four districts experienced COVID as a disruption within a manageable trend. Rochester experienced COVID as an acceleration of a trend that was already unsustainable.

A billion-dollar budget for a shrinking district

Rochester approved a $1.1 billion budget for 2025-26 after closing a $38 million gap through state aid increases and the elimination of more than 130 positions. The district's per-pupil spending exceeds $30,000, among the highest in the state. Its ELA proficiency rate is 16% and its math proficiency rate is 12%, according to the Empire Center's K-12 SOS analysis, compared to state averages of 48% and 52%.

The fiscal pressure is compounding. For 2026-27, the district faces a $53.1 million budget gap, with transportation costs projected to rise 17% to $90 million and health insurance costs increasing 15% to 18%. CFO Robert McDow acknowledged the enrollment challenge directly:

"We have a lot of students leaving. We need to bring them back." — Rochester Beacon, Jan. 2026

Board Vice President Amy Malloy warned that the district's reserves will not last: "Right now, we have a very comfy fund balance and cushion, but that's going to deplete very quickly within four or five years."

Looking further ahead, RCSD's own projections show enrollment dropping to approximately 15,600 by 2031, which would push cumulative deficits past $68 million without intervention. New York's Foundation Aid "save harmless" provision prevents outright funding cuts, but it cannot compensate for a district whose student body has shrunk by more than a third in two decades while its cost structure has not.

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Oil Country Quadrupled Its Schools

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Part of the North Dakota Enrollment 2026 series.

In 2008, McKenzie County^↗ schools enrolled 533 students. In 2026, they enrolled 2,371. That is a 344.8% increase -- the kind of growth most American school districts will never see. It happened because McKenzie County sits on top of the Bakken shale formation, and in 2008, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing made that oil reachable at scale.

The Bakken boom did not just add students to a few classrooms. It reshuffled which part of North Dakota educates children. Eight core oil country districts that enrolled 6,132 students in 2008 now enroll 14,640, a 138.7% increase. Their share of state enrollment nearly doubled, from 6.5% to 12.6%. North Dakota added 22,313 students statewide over that span. Oil country accounts for 38.1% of it.

The scale of transformation

The growth wasn't limited to McKenzie County. Alexander^↗, a tiny district with 50 students in 2008, now enrolls 315 -- a 530% increase. South Prairie^↗ grew from 140 to 552 (+294.3%). Nesson^↗ went from 161 to 444 (+175.8%). Williston^↗, the largest district in the region, grew from 2,110 to 5,584 (+164.6%), the biggest absolute gainer at 3,474 additional students.

Dickinson^↗, the Stark County seat 90 miles south of Williston, grew 62.0% (2,519 to 4,081). Stanley^↗ doubled (+113.9%). Even Tioga^↗, a smaller community north of Williston, added 256 students for a 101.6% gain.

These are not suburbs absorbing spillover from a growing metro. They are isolated prairie communities, hours from the nearest city, that absorbed thousands of families who followed the oil.

Boom, dip, boom

McKenzie County's growth was not a smooth climb. It arrived in waves that tracked the oil market.

The first phase, 2008 to 2015, was explosive. McKenzie grew 148.6% in seven years, adding 304 students in 2015 alone -- a single-year jump of 29.8%. The second phase, 2016 to 2017, was a plateau: oil prices collapsed in late 2014 and enrollment growth slowed to 3.7% and 3.6% in consecutive years. A third phase of renewed growth ran from 2018 to 2020, adding 263 students in 2019 alone.

Then came 2021. McKenzie lost 94 students (-4.9%), its steepest single-year decline on record. The timing lines up with both COVID-19 and the 2020 oil price crash, when West Texas Intermediate briefly went negative. Dickinson lost 257 (-6.5%) the same year. Across oil country, only South Prairie and Nesson, two of the smallest districts, grew in 2021.

The recovery was fast. McKenzie surged by 225 students in 2023 (+12.7%), then 245 more in 2025 (+11.6%), reaching a new peak of 2,350 before adding 21 more in 2026. The pattern is clear: oil country enrollment swings in ways that nowhere else in North Dakota does.

Families, not just roughnecks

The earliest Bakken boom was all temporary workers -- man-camps and RV parks. The school enrollment data tells a different story about what came next: families with young children who stayed.

McKenzie County's kindergarten class grew from 38 students in 2008 to 182 in 2026, a 378.9% increase. The graduating class grew too -- from 61 in 2013 to 106 in 2024 (+73.8%) -- but the growth skewed heavily toward younger grades. As Resources for the Future documented, the first phase of shale development attracted a younger workforce "more likely to have young children rather than teenagers." Elementary enrollment in core oil-producing districts grew over 20% above historic highs by 2015. High school enrollment lagged behind.

The transformation went beyond age. Between 2010 and 2020, North Dakota saw nearly 150% growth in its Latino and Latina population, the largest Latino population growth rate in the nation. McKenzie County's graduation data captures a sliver of that shift: the district's Hispanic graduating cohort grew from 11 students in 2019 to 29 in 2024. Yolanda Rojas, who founded Hispanic Advocacy of North Dakota in Watford City, has described the town as "a great environment to raise a family," part of a broader push to turn oil workers into permanent community members.

The infrastructure strain

Growth this fast has a cost. McKenzie County built Fox Hills Elementary to absorb the surge, then opened the $54 million Bakken Area Skills Center for career and technical education in January 2024. Superintendent Steve Holen has been blunt about the pressure.

"We would take another four or five elementary teachers right now if we could." -- KFYR-TV, October 2023

A 2023 enrollment study projected that elementary schools could exceed capacity as early as 2025, with a potential need for a third elementary building later in the decade. Building space is only part of the problem. Researchers found that aggregate enrollment numbers understate the actual disruption: a school reporting 20 new students in a year likely saw far more come and go throughout the year, as families followed drilling schedules.

A graduation gap

Rapid growth has not meant strong outcomes everywhere. Williston Basin, the largest oil country district, posted a 68.6% graduation rate in 2024 -- 13.8 points below the state average of 82.4%. The trend is going the wrong way: 77.5% in 2022, 68.8% in 2023, 68.6% in 2024, even as the cohort swelled from 271 to 366 students.

McKenzie County has fared better, graduating 85.8% of its 2024 cohort, though that is down from 98.5% in 2015 when the district was still small (65-student cohort). Holding outcomes steady while absorbing 63% more graduates in a decade is not easy.

Williston Basin's graduation gap echoes a broader finding. A 2025 study in Applied Economics found that adolescents in core Bakken oil counties cut their four-year college enrollment rates by 23%, likely pulled toward high-paying oil field jobs available right now. When the rig hiring down the road pays a starting salary that competes with what a four-year degree promises after graduation, the incentive to finish school weakens.

Oil country's growing weight

This is the most consequential shift in the data. In 2008, the eight core Bakken districts educated 6.5% of North Dakota's students. By 2026, that share hit 12.6%. Nearly one in eight North Dakota students now attends school in oil country, up from roughly one in 15 eighteen years ago.

This matters for state education policy. Per-pupil funding follows students, so the fiscal center of gravity has shifted west. Districts that triple or quadruple in size need buildings, teachers, and support staff on a timeline that does not match the slow rhythm of state budget cycles. When the Williston area jumped from 4,290 students in 2021 to 5,139 in 2022 -- partly the merger of Williston 1 and Williams County 8 into Williston Basin 7, partly organic growth -- the system absorbed nearly 850 additional students in a single year.

Continental Resources, the state's second-largest oil producer, announced in January 2026 that it would halt all North Dakota drilling for the first time in 30 years. The Bakken Area Skills Center in Watford City, which opened 24 months ago at a cost of $54 million to train the next generation of oil workers, now sits in a county where rig counts have dropped from 35 to 30. McKenzie County Schools are still growing -- 21 more students in 2026. But for the first time since 2008, the growth is measured in ones and twos, not hundreds. The schools outlasted the man-camps. Whether they outlast the rigs is a different bet.

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Hispanic Enrollment Dips for Only the Second Time in 33 Years

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Massachusetts 2025-26 Enrollment.

For 30 of the past 32 years, Hispanic enrollment in Massachusetts grew. It grew through recessions and recoveries, through three governors and two presidents, through the post-9/11 years and the Great Recession. It grew so reliably that before this year, the only interruption was a COVID-era dip in 2020-21 that lasted exactly one year before the trajectory resumed.

In 2025-26, Hispanic enrollment fell by 1,298 students, to 235,928. It is the second decline in 33 years of data, and the first that cannot be attributed to a pandemic.

From One in 11 to One in Four

The scale of the transformation that preceded this dip is difficult to overstate. In 1993-94, Massachusetts enrolled 77,410 Hispanic students, 8.8% of its student body. By 2024-25, that number had reached 237,226, a peak of 25.9%. Hispanic enrollment more than tripled, adding 159,816 students even as total statewide enrollment barely moved.

The growth came in waves. From 1994 to 2000, Hispanic enrollment rose 28.1%, adding about 3,600 students per year. The pace accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s, peaking at 10,561 new Hispanic students in a single year (2022-23), a period that coincided with a national surge in immigration from Central and South America. By 2025-26, Hispanic students comprised 26.2% of Massachusetts enrollment, up from 8.8% three decades earlier.

That growth rate made the 2026 reversal conspicuous. The state lost 1,298 Hispanic students, a 0.5% decline. Small in percentage terms, and because total enrollment fell faster (down 15,442), the Hispanic share actually ticked up to 26.2%. But in a series that had declined exactly once before, the signal matters more than the magnitude.

Gateway Cities Carried the Loss

The decline was not evenly distributed. It concentrated in the same gateway cities that had been the engines of Hispanic enrollment growth for decades.

Boston^↗ lost 929 Hispanic students, dropping from 20,650 to 19,721, a 4.5% decline. Lynn^↗ lost 341, Lawrence^↗ lost 326, Framingham^↗ lost 316, Chelsea^↗ lost 256, and Everett^↗ lost 252. Fourteen gateway cities combined to lose 3,503 Hispanic students. Gains in smaller and suburban districts offset only a portion: Lowell^↗ gained 86, and vocational-technical schools picked up modest numbers.

The geographic pattern is pointed. These are Massachusetts' immigrant gateway communities, where Hispanic enrollment has historically been fueled by migration from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, and Brazil. Districts where more than half of all students are Hispanic, including Lawrence at 94.7%, Chelsea at 89.9%, and Holyoke^↗ at 81.6%, saw some of the steepest percentage losses.

Marlborough^↗, where 58.3% of students are Hispanic, lost 224 students, an 8.1% decline, the largest percentage drop among districts with more than 2,000 Hispanic students.

The Enforcement Effect

The most likely driver of this reversal is federal immigration enforcement, which intensified sharply in Massachusetts beginning in January 2025. Multiple school superintendents have pointed to ICE activity as the primary factor.

Chelsea Superintendent Almi Abeyta told WBUR that families were leaving not only the city but the country:

"Parents are saying, 'Well, we're leaving ... we don't want to live where there's ICE on the streets, so we're leaving Chelsea.'" — WBUR, September 2025

Chelsea tracked where its departing students went. Of roughly 990 who transferred out since October, about a quarter enrolled in other Massachusetts districts, another quarter left for Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia, and about half moved to other U.S. states, including Florida, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina. School staff reported that families were relocating to states where they perceived less immigration enforcement presence.

Lynn Superintendent Molly Cohen described the consequences in fiscal terms:

"We are seeing fear. We are seeing instability. And we are seeing the financial consequences of that instability land squarely on the districts serving our most vulnerable students." — GBH News, March 2026

In Framingham, the enrollment decline triggered proposed elimination of 84 staff positions, including a dozen ESL teachers across elementary and middle schools. Superintendent Bob Tremblay cited "the fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, in the community" as a factor in the district's loss of 719 students overall.

A Parallel Signal in English Learner Data

The Hispanic enrollment dip did not occur in isolation. English learner enrollment, which overlaps significantly with Hispanic students, fell by 6,889 statewide, from 127,673 to 120,784. It was a sharp reversal: from 2022 to 2025, Massachusetts had been adding an average of 8,100 English learners per year.

The two trends have tracked each other closely since 2015, and both fell simultaneously in 2020-21 (COVID) and again in 2025-26. The English learner decline was proportionally steeper, a 5.4% drop compared to 0.5% for Hispanic enrollment overall. That gap suggests the losses were concentrated among more recently arrived families, who are more likely to be classified as English learners, rather than among established Hispanic households whose children are English-proficient.

Boston Superintendent Mary Skipper attributed the district's decline to "a decrease in international immigration to the district," noting that Boston's birth rate also fell nearly 15% between 2017 and 2021.

Other forces at work

Immigration enforcement has the most direct evidence behind it, but two other forces are pulling in the same direction.

The first is the national slowdown in immigration itself. Net international migration to the United States peaked at 2.7 million between July 2023 and June 2024, then fell to 1.3 million the following year, a 53.8% drop the Census Bureau called a "historic decline." Massachusetts' net international migration dropped from 77,957 to 40,240 in the same period, according to UMass Donahue Institute analysis of Census data. Fewer arrivals means fewer new students, regardless of enforcement activity. This is a structural shift, not a behavioral one, and it would affect enrollment even in the absence of ICE operations.

The second is cost of living. Massachusetts has among the highest housing costs in the country, and Chelsea school officials reported that families cited both ICE sightings and affordability as reasons for leaving. Separating the enforcement effect from the cost-of-living effect is not possible with enrollment data alone. Both push in the same direction.

The Structural Mismatch

The fiscal consequences fall hardest on the districts least equipped to absorb them. Chelsea projected a $5.7 million budget shortfall from its enrollment loss. As School Committee member Sarah Neville noted: "We might have fewer students, but we still have the same amount of school buildings and we still have the same electrical bills."

Statewide, Massachusetts lost 15,442 students in 2025-26, falling to 900,490, its lowest enrollment since 1994-95. Hispanic students accounted for 1,298 of that decline. White students accounted for 14,256, a 3.0% drop that has continued uninterrupted for years. The difference: white enrollment decline reflects long-term demographic contraction. Hispanic enrollment decline, after a generation of nearly unbroken growth, reflects something new.

Springfield's two-year signal

The COVID dip of 1,690 Hispanic students in 2021 reversed the very next year with a rebound of 7,306. This time, the forces pulling enrollment down, federal enforcement policy and reduced immigration flows, show no signs of reversing. Net international migration to the U.S. is projected to fall further, to about 321,000 between July 2025 and June 2026.

Springfield^↗, the state's third-largest district at 68.1% Hispanic, lost 136 Hispanic students this year after losing 229 the year before. Two years ago, the district was still gaining. Chelsea tracked where its departing families went: about a quarter enrolled in other Massachusetts districts, a quarter left the country, and half moved to Florida, Arkansas, and Alabama. The 33 districts where Hispanic students are already the majority are watching Springfield's numbers to see what their own will look like next fall.

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Marion County Charters Now Enroll Nearly Double IPS

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Indiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2016, Indianapolis Public Schools^↗ enrolled 29,583 students. The 28 charter corporations scattered across Marion County enrolled 16,544. IPS had the numbers, the name, and the buildings. The charter sector had the trajectory.

A decade later, those lines have fully crossed. Marion County's 73 charter corporations enrolled 35,898 students in 2025-26. IPS enrolled 19,774. The charter sector is now 1.8 times the size of the district it grew up alongside. Few metro areas anywhere in the country have seen a school-choice transformation this thorough.

The crossover happened in 2020

The lines crossed in the 2019-20 school year, when charter enrollment hit 26,307 and IPS slipped to 25,611. COVID then widened the divide: charters added 4,604 students in 2020-21 while IPS lost 2,681. By the time the pandemic stabilized, the charter sector was serving 30,911 students to IPS's 22,930, a gap of nearly 8,000.

What happened next is the underappreciated part of the story. Charter growth slowed sharply after 2021, from annual gains of 3,000 to 4,000 students to gains of 500 to 800. The sector appeared to plateau. But IPS kept falling. In 2025-26, IPS shed 1,281 students, its worst non-pandemic loss in the decade. The charter sector added just 212. The ratio still widened to 1.82:1, driven not by charter expansion but by the continuing erosion at IPS.

45 new organizations in a decade

The charter sector's 117% enrollment growth came from two sources: new schools and organic growth at existing ones. Of the 73 charter corporations operating in Marion County in 2025-26, 45 did not exist in 2016. Those 45 new organizations enroll 16,946 students, nearly half of the sector's total.

The expansion was not steady. The sector added 10 new corporations in a single year during the pandemic (2020-21), more than any other year. Eight more appeared in 2024-25. Some of these are small, single-school operations. Others are part of national networks: KIPP, Christel House, and Phalen Leadership Academies each operate multiple campuses. The largest single entity is Indiana Connections Academy 7-12, a virtual school with 5,027 students, followed by its K-6 counterpart with 1,631.

The virtual school asterisk

Five virtual and online charter corporations headquartered in Marion County enrolled 8,582 students in 2025-26, nearly a quarter of the charter total. Indiana Connections Academy alone accounts for 6,658, and Hoosier College and Career Academy adds another 1,518. These students may live anywhere in Indiana.

Strip out virtual and online charters, and the brick-and-mortar charter sector still enrolls 27,316 students, 1.38 times IPS. The dominance is real even after the virtual adjustment, but the 1.82:1 headline ratio overstates how many families physically chose a charter school building in Marion County over an IPS building.

One county, 63% of Indiana's charter sector

Marion County is not just the center of Indianapolis charter schooling. It is the center of Indiana charter schooling. The county's charter corporations enrolled 63.3% of all charter students statewide in 2025-26, up from 55.3% in 2016. The concentration is increasing: as the statewide charter sector grew from 29,906 to 56,675 students, Marion County captured a disproportionate share of that growth.

Charter enrollment as a share of all Marion County public enrollment doubled from 11.1% in 2016 to 22.0% in 2025-26. In 2021, the share crossed 19% and has climbed steadily since.

Different sectors, different students

The two sectors serve overlapping but distinct student bodies. Black students make up 42.2% of charter enrollment and 38.3% of IPS. Hispanic students, by contrast, represent 37.1% of IPS but 25.5% of charters. White students are 25.8% of the charter sector and 17.4% of IPS.

The Mind Trust, the nonprofit that has supported the launch of more than 50 charter and innovation network schools in Indianapolis, reported in January 2025 that 61% of students attending public schools within or near IPS boundaries were enrolled in charter or innovation network schools rather than IPS-managed campuses. That figure includes both independent charters and IPS's own Innovation Network schools, which operate autonomously under contract with nonprofit boards but are technically part of the district.

The grade-level data reveals another dimension. Charter corporations enrolled 5,710 twelfth-graders in 2025-26, compared to 1,252 at IPS. Much of that comes from adult-serving programs like Christel House DORS and the Excel Center network, which serve students who have dropped out of traditional schools. The charter sector has, in effect, built a parallel pipeline that catches students the traditional system loses.

How Indianapolis became a charter city

The roots of this transformation predate the charter era. When Indianapolis created Unigov in 1969, merging city and county government, lawmakers deliberately excluded schools, leaving IPS as a stand-alone district surrounded by 13 other Marion County school corporations. A federal desegregation order in 1971 accelerated white flight. IPS enrollment fell from 108,000 to 47,000 by the early 1990s, weakening the district's financial base for a generation.

Indiana's 2001 charter school law then did something unusual: it gave the Indianapolis mayor authorization power over charter schools. Democratic Mayor Bart Peterson used that power aggressively. When Peterson left office, he co-founded The Mind Trust, which has since catalyzed the launch of dozens of charter and innovation network schools.

The non-IPS traditional districts in Marion County, meanwhile, have been largely stable. The 14 traditional school corporations other than IPS enrolled 107,792 students in 2025-26, barely changed from 103,060 a decade earlier. The charter expansion has not noticeably eroded their enrollment. The competition has been, overwhelmingly, a two-player game between charters and IPS.

The governance question

The enrollment data lands in the middle of a governance upheaval. The Indiana legislature passed HB 1423 in February 2026, creating the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, a nine-member, mayor-appointed board that will oversee transportation, facilities, and school performance for both IPS and charter schools. The board must include three charter school leaders, three IPS board members, and three logistics or community experts.

"State policy decisions over the last decade have put IPS in a fiscally constrained space." — IPS Superintendent Aleesia Johnson, WFYI, February 2026

The legislation responds to a structural reality the enrollment data makes plain: IPS is no longer the primary provider of public education within its own boundaries. Seventy-three charter organizations, one shrinking traditional district, and a state-funded voucher pipeline all operate on the same territory, using the same buildings, drawing from the same neighborhoods.

The new corporation's first test will be concrete: which of IPS's half-empty buildings get reassigned to charter operators, and under what terms. State law currently requires districts to make unused facilities available to charters. HB 1423 would exempt IPS from that requirement while the new board is standing up. That exemption has an expiration date. The buildings do not. Marion County's education system crossed from one governance era to another six years ago, when charter enrollment surpassed IPS. The legislation is the first acknowledgment that the old structure cannot hold.

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Hawaii's Charter Schools: A 58-Point Spread from the State's Best Attendance to Near the Worst

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Kanuikapono Public Charter School on Kauai has a 1% chronic absenteeism rate -- the lowest in Hawaii. Connections PCS, an online virtual school, has a 59% rate -- the second-highest in the state after Olomana, an alternative school. Both are charter schools. The 58-point gap between them is the widest spread of any school category in Hawaii's data.

Of 20 identifiable charter and public charter schools in 2025, rates span the full spectrum: from 1% to 59%, with 11 above the state average of 24% and 9 below. The category tells you almost nothing about a school's attendance outcomes.

The Full Range

School	Rate
Kanuikapono PCS	1%
Na Wai Ola PCS	3%
Kanu o ka 'Aina NCPCS	9%
Malama Honua PCS	13%
Voyager PCS	16%
Kihei Charter	18%
Alaka'i O Kaua'i Charter	19%
Laupahoehoe Community PCS	19%
Innovations PCS	24%
Kona Pacific PCS	26%
West Hawaii Explorations PCS	26%
Kawaikini NCPCS	28%
Kapolei Charter	30%
Kualapu'u Conversion Charter	31%
Halau Ku Mana PCS	33%
Ka Waihona o ka Na'auao PCS	39%
Kua O Ka La NCPCS	39%
Ke Ana La'ahana PCS	40%
Ke Kula Niihau o Kekaha - LPCS	41%
Connections PCS	59%

The pattern does not sort cleanly by any single factor. Hawaiian immersion and culturally-focused charters appear at both extremes: Kanuikapono (1%) and Kanu o ka 'Aina (9%) are among the best, while Ke Ana La'ahana (40%) and Kua O Ka La (39%) are among the worst.

Na Wai Ola's Dramatic Turnaround

The most striking individual charter story belongs to Na Wai Ola Public Charter School, which went from a 40% chronic rate in 2019 to 57% at its COVID peak, then dropped to just 3% in 2025. The 37-point improvement from the pre-COVID baseline makes it one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the state -- the school is now 37 points better than where it started.

The 2025 number -- a drop from 45% in 2024 to 3% in 2025 -- is a single-year improvement of 42 percentage points. That kind of overnight transformation in a small school often reflects a fundamental change in how the school operates, who it serves, or how attendance is measured.

Charter vs. Traditional: No Clear Winner

When compared as sectors, charter and traditional schools have nearly identical average chronic absenteeism rates in 2025: charters average 26.0% compared to 24.3% for traditional schools. The median rates are also similar: 26% for charters and 23% for traditional.

The difference is in the tails. Charters include both the state's best (1%) and some of its worst schools. Traditional schools cluster more tightly around the average, with a range of 2% to 73% (Olomana, an alternative school, being the outlier at the top).

What the Spread Reveals

Kanuikapono sits on Kauai's north shore, runs a Hawaiian language immersion program, and enrolls fewer than 200 students whose families specifically chose a culturally-grounded school. Connections PCS is a statewide virtual school where students log in from home. Comparing their attendance rates is like comparing a family restaurant to a food truck -- the product looks similar on paper, but the operations have almost nothing in common.

The virtual school question matters. Connections PCS's 59% rate reflects a problem every state struggles with: what does "attendance" mean when there is no building? The metric of missing 15+ days was designed for schools with walls and bells. Apply it to online instruction and the numbers measure something different.

Policymakers who treat charter schools as a single sector are looking at a label, not a reality. A Hawaiian immersion school on Kauai and a virtual school enrolling students across six islands share a governance category and nothing else.

The Hawaii Department of Education and the Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission did not respond to requests for comment.

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Florida's Attendance Recovery Has Stalled at 7.5% — and 2024 Made It Worse

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Before the pandemic, one in five Florida public school students was chronically absent. Now it is nearly one in three, and the distance between those two numbers has barely budged in two years.

Florida's chronic absenteeism rate — the share of students missing 10% or more of enrolled school days — peaked at 32.3% during the 2021-22 school year. Two full school years later, it stands at 31.4%. That 0.9 percentage-point improvement represents just 7.5% of the gap between the pre-COVID baseline and the pandemic peak, a recovery so minimal it rounds to nothing at the scale of a state with 3.1 million public school students.

Part of the Florida Chronic Absenteeism series.

A year of backsliding

The 2022-23 school year offered a flicker of hope. The chronic rate dropped 1.4 percentage points, from 32.3% to 30.9%, the first meaningful improvement since the pandemic began. Counselors reconnected with families. Schools deployed attendance specialists. The assumption, reasonable at the time, was that the worst had passed and the recovery would continue.

It did not. In 2023-24, the rate climbed back to 31.4%, erasing nearly a third of the prior year's progress. The reversal came during a year of normal school operations — no quarantines, no hybrid schedules, no pandemic disruptions of any kind.

That pattern, a modest dip followed by a re-acceleration, is more troubling than a steady plateau. It suggests the 2022-23 improvement may have captured the easiest recoveries: students whose pandemic-era habits simply needed a push back toward normalcy. What remains are students with entrenched barriers — housing instability, unmet mental health needs, transportation gaps, fractured relationships with schools — that a single attendance letter cannot solve.

The arithmetic of a generation

The math is bleak. From the 2022 peak of 32.3% to the current 31.4%, Florida has recovered 0.9 percentage points. The gap back to the pre-COVID rate of 20.0% is 11.4 points. A simple linear projection from the three post-peak years — the only trajectory the data supports — puts the return to pre-COVID levels at roughly 2048, a quarter-century from now.

That projection is deliberately crude, and the state's leaders would rightly object that it assumes nothing changes. But the point is not the exact year. The point is the scale of the problem: Florida is so far from its pre-pandemic attendance baseline that even sustained, annual improvement would take many years to close the gap.

Florida ranks third nationally in chronic absenteeism, trailing only Alaska and New Mexico. The state legislature has taken notice: SB 938, filed by Senator Stan McClain, would require teachers to flag students absent 10% or more within the first nine weeks of school, shifting identification from an end-of-year report card to an early warning signal.

976,305 students

Raw numbers convey what percentages can obscure. In 2023-24, 976,305 Florida students were chronically absent, up from 628,756 in 2018-19. That is 347,549 additional students missing critical instructional time.

Research from Johns Hopkins found that chronic absence in sixth grade predicts dropping out more reliably than test scores. Florida has now run four consecutive school years with chronic rates above 30%. The students who entered sixth grade during the pandemic peak are finishing middle school, carrying cumulative absences that no single intervention year can undo.

The state has one school counselor for every 459 students, nearly double the recommended ratio. SB 938's early-warning mandate could help identify students sooner, but identification was never the bottleneck. Schools know who is missing. The question is what they can do about it with the staff they have.

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The Majority-Minority Wave Reaches the Suburbs

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Connecticut 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2011, Ansonia^↗ was barely on the line. White students made up 51.9% of the district's enrollment, a slim majority in a small city wedged between New Haven and Derby along the Naugatuck River. By 2026, white students account for 21.5% of Ansonia's enrollment. The threshold Ansonia crossed in 2013 has since been crossed by a dozen more Connecticut districts, many of them places that looked nothing like Ansonia 15 years ago.

Fifty-eight of Connecticut's 193 districts are now majority-minority, meaning white students make up less than half of enrollment. That is 30.1% of all districts, nearly double the 17.2% in 2011. The shift has moved beyond the cities that anchored it for decades. It has reached Bristol^↗, a factory town of 60,000 in Hartford County. It has reached East Haven^↗, a shoreline suburb next to New Haven. It has reached South Windsor^↗, an affluent Hartford suburb with a median household income above $140,000.

Where the line moved

Connecticut's majority-minority districts used to be a short list of cities: Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, New London, Windham. These were places where white share had been below 50% for years, in some cases decades. Hartford was 8.1% white in 2011. Bridgeport was 7.9%. The story was concentrated and familiar.

What changed between 2011 and 2026 is where the next crossings happened. Thirteen traditional public school districts that were majority-white in 2011 are now majority-minority. The crossovers cluster in two geographic rings around the state's urban cores.

The inner ring crossed first and fastest. Derby^↗, just upriver from Ansonia, went from 56.6% white to 24.0%. Naugatuck^↗, a Naugatuck Valley town of about 32,000, dropped from 66.7% to 37.0%. Torrington^↗, the largest town in Litchfield County, fell from 72.3% to 42.7%. In every case, Hispanic enrollment growth was the primary driver: Torrington's Hispanic share rose from 17.2% to 43.8%, East Haven's from 16.8% to 44.1%, Naugatuck's from 18.1% to 42.4%.

The outer ring tells a different story. South Windsor went from 75.8% white to 42.5%, but the shift was not Hispanic-driven. Asian students grew from 9.5% of enrollment to 35.6%, making South Windsor's crossover unique among the 13. Rocky Hill^↗, another Hartford suburb, followed a similar pattern: Asian share nearly tripled from 13.5% to 31.0%. In these districts, highly educated families drawn to strong suburban school systems reshaped the enrollment profile from within.

The acceleration after 2022

The trend was gradual for most of the decade. From 2011 to 2019, the number of majority-minority districts grew from 32 to 41, about one new crossover per year. Then something shifted.

Six districts crossed the threshold in 2022 alone: Bristol, East Windsor, Groton, South Windsor, Torrington, and Norwich Free Academy. By 2024, the count had jumped to 54. (The apparent dip to 32 in 2020-2021 reflects a data reporting gap: 18 entities, mostly charter schools and regional service centers, temporarily dropped from the enrollment files during the pandemic. Most were already majority-minority. The underlying trend in traditional districts was continuous.)

Part of this acceleration reflects broader demographic math. Statewide, white students fell below 50% for the first time in 2021, hitting 49.9%. By 2026, they are 44.7% of enrollment. As the statewide share drops, more individual districts approach and cross the threshold, and the crossings compound. A district at 55% white in 2019 that lost two percentage points per year would cross at 51% by 2021 and sit at 43% by 2025.

The practical consequence: a majority of Connecticut's students, 51.2%, now attend majority-minority districts. In 2011, that figure was 35.2%. The shift is not just about where the line is drawn on a map. It is about how many students live on each side of it.

Two forces, one destination

The crossover districts split into two distinct demographic pathways, and the distinction matters for the communities involved.

In the Naugatuck Valley and shoreline suburbs, Hispanic families have moved outward from New Haven, Waterbury, and Hartford into adjacent towns. East Haven, which shares a border with New Haven, saw Hispanic enrollment rise by 27.3 percentage points. Bristol, the largest of the crossover districts with 7,597 students, saw Hispanic share climb from 18.0% to 40.3%. These are working-class and middle-class communities where housing costs are lower than in the wealthier Fairfield County suburbs further south.

Connecticut's Latino population has grown by about 80,000 residents between 2018 and 2023, roughly a 14% increase. That growth has spread well beyond Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport into suburban and small-city communities across the state. The suburban expansion of Latino families is reshaping the enrollment maps of districts that had been demographically stable for decades.

In the Hartford suburbs, a different force is at work. South Windsor and Rocky Hill are affluent communities where the demographic shift is driven primarily by Asian families, many of them professionals drawn to strong school systems and proximity to Hartford's insurance and technology employers. South Windsor's Asian student share nearly quadrupled from 9.5% to 35.6%, while Hispanic enrollment grew more modestly from 6.8% to 11.2%. The town's median household income exceeds $144,000.

These two pathways produce the same statistical outcome, a majority-minority district, but represent fundamentally different community dynamics.

The next wave at the gates

Eleven more traditional districts sit between 50% and 60% white in 2026. Farmington^↗, at 51.1% white, is the closest to crossing. Like South Windsor, its shift is Asian-driven: Asian students grew from 12.6% to 24.9% of enrollment. West Hartford^↗, the state's ninth-largest district with 9,069 students, sits at 53.5% white, down from 62.3% in 2011.

Further out, Shelton (55.2% white, down from 82.3%), Trumbull (56.9%, down from 82.4%), and Greenwich (58.9%, down from 70.5%) have each shed more than 10 percentage points of white share since 2011. Whether the pace continues is uncertain, but the direction has been consistent. These are some of Connecticut's wealthiest communities.

What segregation looks like now

Connecticut is divided into 169 towns largely separated by race and wealth, a legacy of exclusionary zoning, restrictive covenants, and autonomous municipalities with independent school systems. The 1996 Sheff v. O'Neill ruling found that Hartford's racial isolation violated the state constitution, producing a magnet school and Open Choice program that now serves over 56% of Hartford students.

But the demographic data reveals a paradox. Connecticut's school segregation may be eroding not through court orders or magnet programs, but through residential migration that is slowly diversifying the suburbs. The share of districts that are majority-minority has nearly doubled. The share of students in those districts has crossed 50%. The demographic composition of towns like East Haven and Naugatuck in 2026 would have been unrecognizable to residents in 2011.

"This achievement represents more than a number. It reflects the state's deep commitment to expanding meaningful educational choices for students and families." — Education Commissioner Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, on the Sheff settlement milestone, Hartford Courant, December 2025

Yet the structural segregation persists in a different form. More than half of Connecticut's Black, Indigenous, and Latino students still attend districts where over 75% of students are students of color. Hartford is 5.6% white. Bridgeport is 7.2%. The wave has reached the suburbs, but it has not reached the wealthiest ones: Darien, Weston, and New Canaan remain above 75% white. The geographic spread of majority-minority districts is real, but so is the concentration of students of color in a handful of urban systems.

Farmington at the line

At 51.1% white, Farmington is a single school year from crossing the threshold. Its neighbor West Hartford is three points behind. If both cross, two of the Hartford region's most sought-after school districts will join a list that until recently consisted of cities, factory towns, and working-class suburbs.

A district at 49% white and a district at 51% white serve similar student populations. The 50% line is a statistical marker, not a cliff. But in a state whose school system was built on the premise that suburbs and cities are separate worlds, every crossing chips away at that premise a little more.

Connecticut's 169 towns drew those lines. The families moving through them are redrawing the map.

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Arizona's Attendance Recovery Has Stalled — and Nearly One in Four Students Is Still Missing Too Much School

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Three years ago, nearly one in three Arizona students was chronically absent. The state's chronic absenteeism rate had surged to 32.0% in the 2021-22 school year, a figure so far beyond historical norms that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne called it "catastrophic."

Arizona responded. The rate fell to 28.1% in 2022-23, then 24.4% in 2023-24. Nearly eight points of improvement in two years. Progress was real.

Then it stopped.

The 2024-25 rate came in at 23.8%, a decline of just 0.6 percentage points. After two years of cutting roughly four points annually, the improvement decelerated by more than 80%. Arizona appears to have hit a recovery floor — a level of chronic absence that standard interventions cannot easily push below.

The Deceleration

The numbers tell a clear story of momentum stalling:

2022 to 2023: -3.9 percentage points
2023 to 2024: -3.8 percentage points
2024 to 2025: -0.6 percentage points

If Arizona had maintained its 2022-2024 improvement pace, the chronic rate would have dropped below 21% this year. Instead, it barely moved. The state has recovered 42.8% of the way back to its pre-COVID baseline of 12.7% — less than halfway, with the easy gains seemingly exhausted.

What the Projection Looks Like

At the 2025 improvement pace of 0.6 percentage points per year, simple arithmetic produces a sobering projection: Arizona would not return to its pre-COVID chronic rate until approximately 2043.

That projection is almost certainly too pessimistic. Funding initiatives, accountability measures, and community-based interventions could accelerate improvement. But it illustrates how far Arizona remains from normal — and how much the stall year matters. Every year of flat-lined improvement extends the timeline considerably.

Nearly Double the Pre-COVID Rate

Arizona's current 23.8% chronic rate is 11.1 percentage points above its 2018-19 level of 12.7%. Put another way: the state has nearly twice as many chronically absent students as it did before the pandemic.

The pre-COVID trend was already troubling. Arizona's chronic rate edged up from 11.9% in 2017-18 to 12.7% in 2018-19. The pandemic didn't create a crisis from nothing — it amplified an existing problem and then locked in a higher baseline.

Who Has Recovered — and Who Hasn't

Recovery varies dramatically across student populations. White students have recovered 49.5% of their COVID-era spike, the best of any racial subgroup. Economically disadvantaged students have recovered 47.0%. But the groups that were hit hardest have recovered least:

Native American students: 37.3% chronic rate in 2025, only 31.4% recovered
Homeless students: 39.7% chronic rate, only 27.4% recovered
Black students: 23.4% chronic rate, 38.9% recovered
Hispanic students: 27.9% chronic rate, 41.8% recovered

The pattern is consistent: the higher the pre-COVID rate, the less recovery has occurred. The groups most vulnerable before the pandemic remain the most vulnerable after it — and the gap between them and the overall average has widened.

What the Stall Means

A chronically absent student in Arizona misses roughly 18 days per year, nearly a full month of instruction. At 23.8%, that is one in four students statewide.

Superintendent Horne has responded with punitive measures: automatic grade retention for students with 18 or more absences, proposed automatic F's after nine unexcused absences. The theory is that consequences will change behavior. But the students still missing school after two years of recovery efforts are disproportionately Native American, homeless, and low-income. Their barriers are less about motivation than about getting to school at all.

Whatever Arizona did to cut eight points between 2022 and 2024 is no longer working. The 0.6-point improvement in 2025 is not a slowdown. It is a wall.

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Wisconsin's Attendance Recovery Just Hit a Wall

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Wisconsin's battle against chronic absenteeism made real progress in 2023, when the state cut its chronic rate by 3.2 percentage points in a single year -- the kind of improvement that suggested the pandemic's grip on student attendance might finally be loosening.

Then the gains started shrinking. In 2024, the improvement dropped to 1.8 points. In 2025, it was just 0.4 points.

The state's chronic absenteeism rate now sits at 17.3% — meaning 130,131 students, roughly one in six, missed more than 10% of school days during the 2024-25 school year. That is 5.4 points below the 2022 peak of 22.7%, but still 4.4 points above the pre-COVID rate of 12.9% in 2019. And it is a far cry from the 9.6-11.9% range that Wisconsin maintained from 2006 to 2016, before a structural shift pushed rates higher even before the pandemic arrived.

The Decelerating Recovery

The pattern is unmistakable: each year's improvement is smaller than the last.

2023: -3.2 percentage points (from 22.7% to 19.5%)
2024: -1.8 percentage points (from 19.5% to 17.7%)
2025: -0.4 percentage points (from 17.7% to 17.3%)

At the current pace of improvement — averaging 1.8 percentage points per year over the last three years — a simple projection would put Wisconsin back at its pre-COVID rate of 12.9% by 2028. But that average is misleading, because it is dominated by the early gains. At the most recent year's pace of just 0.4 points, reaching 12.9% would take until the mid-2030s. Reaching the pre-2017 baseline of 9.6% would take even longer.

If the improvement continues to shrink — from 3.2 to 1.8 to 0.4 — the state could be approaching a plateau, a rate that current interventions simply cannot push lower.

52,000 More Than the Low Point

The raw numbers tell a story that percentages can obscure. In 2014, Wisconsin had 78,043 chronically absent students — the lowest point in the dataset. By 2019, that number had already climbed to 102,611, reflecting the pre-COVID drift upward. Today, 130,131 students are chronically absent, 52,088 more than the 2014 low and 27,520 more than the last pre-pandemic year.

Those 130,131 students are not evenly distributed across the state. Milwaukee alone accounts for 28,355 of them — more than one in five of all chronically absent students statewide. The state's five largest districts by absence count hold 38% of all chronically absent students, even though they enroll a much smaller share of total students.

What the Wall Means

The decelerating recovery is consistent with a pattern observed nationally. The initial post-pandemic improvement likely captured students who were temporarily disengaged — families whose attendance habits were disrupted by remote learning, quarantines, or pandemic anxiety but who were ready to return to regular attendance once conditions normalized.

The students who remain chronically absent may represent a structurally harder population to reach: families dealing with housing instability, mental health challenges, transportation barriers, or a fundamental shift in how they view the necessity of daily attendance.

Wisconsin's ENGAGE program, a partnership between the Department of Public Instruction and Graduation Alliance funded by federal COVID relief dollars, has placed attendance coaches in 27 districts including Milwaukee. Governor Tony Evers proposed $6 million in the 2025-27 budget to sustain the program. The state legislature also passed a truancy bill package, including $2 million in truancy reduction grants.

Whether those investments are sufficient to break through the current plateau remains an open question. Wisconsin uses membership-based funding rather than average daily attendance, meaning chronic absenteeism does not directly reduce state aid the way it does in states like California or Texas. That removes one financial incentive for districts to aggressively pursue attendance improvement — though the academic consequences of missed school days are the same regardless of funding formula.

The Pre-2017 Question

There is a deeper question embedded in the data. Wisconsin's chronic absenteeism rate was not stable before COVID hit. After holding between 9.6% and 11.9% for a decade, the rate jumped to 12.4% in 2017 and kept climbing to 12.9% by 2019.

Something changed before the pandemic — and that something has never been identified or reversed. Even if Wisconsin manages to push its rate back below 13%, it would still be operating in an era of elevated absence compared to the early 2010s.

The 0.4-point improvement in 2025 is not failure. It is still improvement. But it is the clearest signal yet that the easy gains are over, and that returning to anything resembling pre-pandemic attendance norms will require something different from what has worked so far.

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Utah's Charter Absence Rate Spikes to 27% While Traditional Districts Hold Steady

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

At Navigator Pointe Academy^↗, a charter school in Draper, more than four out of every five students missed enough school last year to be classified as chronically absent. Its 82.8% chronic absenteeism rate is the highest of any district or charter in Utah, nearly three and a half times the statewide average.

Navigator Pointe is not an anomaly. It is the leading edge of a charter sector whose attendance is pulling sharply away from the rest of the state.

The gap nobody saw coming

Utah's overall chronic absenteeism rate held flat at 23.8% in 2024-25, unchanged from the prior year. That number, which USBE reported as the headline figure when launching its "Every Day Counts" campaign last August, masks a divergence that only becomes visible when the data is split by sector.

The charter sector's chronic absenteeism rate jumped to 27.3% in 2025, up 2.8 percentage points from 24.5% the prior year. Traditional districts, meanwhile, edged down to 23.3% from 23.6%. The result: a 4-percentage-point gap between the two sectors, the widest in the three years since Utah began reporting charter and traditional rates separately.

The state total barely moved because traditional districts enroll the large majority of Utah's students. Their slight improvement offset the charter spike in the aggregate, producing a flat statewide number that obscured a meaningful shift underneath.

Seventeen charters above 50%

The distribution of chronic absence rates reveals how differently the two sectors look in 2025. Traditional districts cluster between 12% and 40%, with a median of 25.0%. Charter schools spread across a far wider range, from a low of 0.2% at Success Academy to that 82.8% at Navigator Pointe Academy. Seventeen charter schools posted rates above 50%, meaning a majority of their students were chronically absent. Only one traditional district, Uintah^↗, crossed that threshold.

Among the worst: Roots Charter High School (82.0%), Uintah River High (79.3%), East Hollywood High (78.3%), Moab Charter School (71.6%), and Treeside Charter School (70.3%). Some of the highest-rate charters, including Roots, East Hollywood High, and Fast Forward High, are alternative or credit-recovery programs designed to re-engage students who were already disconnected from school. Their high chronic absence rates may reflect the population they serve rather than institutional failure. But even setting those aside, the list of charters above 50% includes conventional schools like Summit Academy (57.2%) and Bonneville Academy (49.9%).

At the other end, InTech Collegiate Academy (4.1%), Utah International Charter School (4.7%), and Franklin Discovery Academy (5.3%) posted rates well below the statewide average, better than all but a handful of traditional districts.

The charter sector's mean chronic absence rate in 2025 was 31.5%, compared to 25.6% for traditional districts. Fifty-five of 113 charter schools, just under half, exceeded 30%.

What the accountability framework measures, and what it doesn't

The Utah State Charter School Board evaluates schools on three dimensions: academic performance, financial health, and operational compliance. Chronic absenteeism is not a standalone metric in any of the three. A charter school where four-fifths of students are chronically absent can remain in good standing if its test scores, budgets, and governance documents pass review.

A legislative audit found that Utah is the only state among 45 with charter programs that does not require schools to periodically renew their contracts, a "missed opportunity to ensure standards are being met," according to lead auditor Ryan Thelin. The same audit noted that charter performance is unusually polarized: 21% of charter high schools rank in the top 10% statewide, but 15% rank in the bottom 10%.

"Charter schools have inconsistent performance." — Lead Auditor Ryan Thelin, KSL

The attendance data fits that pattern. The charter sector simultaneously contains Utah's lowest chronic absence rates and its highest, with nothing about the accountability framework designed to address the bottom.

That gap is part of what prompted HB 106, introduced by Rep. Andrew Stoddard (D-Sandy) during the 2026 legislative session. The bill would have required USBE to gather and publish school-level absenteeism data, including root cause analysis. It stalled during the session, but a related measure, SB 58, was signed into law on March 19. SB 58 creates uniform statewide definitions for attendance in both traditional and virtual schools, addressing a long-standing problem: schools and districts have been measuring absenteeism in different ways, making cross-sector comparisons unreliable.

"We really need to figure out what is the cause of this chronic absenteeism — and until we understand what the cause is, we can't really do much about it." — Rep. Andrew Stoddard (D-Sandy), Deseret News, Jan. 2026

Charter transparency has become a broader concern in Utah. In a separate dispute, the state auditor filed a contempt petition in February against American Preparatory Academy after the charter operator refused to disclose how much it pays top administrators. The school funneled $31 million since 2022 to a similarly named private management company that handles executive payroll. While unrelated to attendance, the case illustrates a pattern of limited visibility into charter operations that spans financial and academic domains.

Four traditional districts at their worst

The charter sector's spike is the bigger story by volume, but three traditional districts recorded their highest chronic absence rates in 14 years of data: Uintah District^↗ (50.9%), Logan City District^↗ (43.7%), and Piute District^↗ (36.3%). Garfield District^↗ held at 35.1%, matching its prior-year high.

Uintah's trajectory is the steepest. The district's rate climbed from 20.0% in 2015 to 37.3% in 2024, then jumped 13.6 percentage points in a single year to 50.9%. That one-year spike is exceeded only by Piute's 14.8-point jump. Located in the Uintah Basin, the district serves a community where oil and gas employment can pull families into shift schedules and seasonal relocations that conflict with school calendars.

Piute, one of Utah's smallest rural districts in south-central Utah, saw the biggest percentage-point increase: 14.8 points, from 21.5% to 36.3%. In small districts, a handful of families changing attendance patterns can move the rate sharply. Logan City's increase was more gradual but persistent, rising from 13.3% in 2017 to 43.7% in 2025. After dipping to 31.9% in 2023, the rate surged back above 38% and kept climbing.

Among traditional districts, 15 of 42 exceeded a 30% chronic absence rate. Ogden City^↗ (40.0%), Grand (38.0%), and Tintic (37.4%) were the next highest after the four record-setters. At the other end, Morgan District (12.1%), Millard (13.7%), and Iron (14.4%) posted the lowest rates.

Where things improved

Not everything moved in the wrong direction. Wasatch District^↗ cut its chronic absence rate by 11.7 percentage points, from 26.2% to 14.5%, the largest single-year improvement among traditional districts. Wayne District dropped 8.1 points, and Tintic fell 7.4 despite still posting the fifth-highest rate in the state. Morgan improved nearly 6 points.

Among charter schools, several of the best-performing schools demonstrated that high attendance is achievable in the sector. Success Academy's 0.2% chronic absence rate and the Northern Utah Academy for Math, Engineering & Science at 1.4% are functionally near-perfect attendance. These schools tend to be STEM-focused or academically selective programs, which complicates direct comparison, but they show that the charter model itself does not inherently produce poor attendance.

The measurement problem

One caveat shapes how to read the charter figures. Utah only began reporting chronic absence data separately by charter and traditional sectors in 2023. That means the charter sector's trend line covers just three years. A charter school hitting its "all-time high" in 2025 may only be exceeding a two-year baseline.

For traditional districts, the picture is clearer. The three at all-time highs each have 14 years of data. Their records represent genuine historical peaks.

At the state level, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled over a decade, from 12.2% in 2014 to 23.8% in 2024. The 2025 data shows that recovery from the pandemic attendance collapse has stalled. The post-COVID peak of 25.2% in 2023 gave way to improvement in 2024 (23.8%), but the 2025 data held flat rather than continuing to decline. The charter sector reversed course entirely.

USBE's statewide attendance campaign launched months before the 2024-25 school year ended. Whether it moved any numbers is unclear. The statewide rate did not budge, and the sector where rates worsened most -- charter schools -- operates under an accountability structure that does not directly track attendance outcomes.

What comes next

The question for Utah is whether the charter sector's 2025 spike is a one-year blip or the beginning of a structural pattern. Three years of data is too thin to distinguish a trend from volatility. But the shape of the charter distribution, with its long right tail of schools above 50%, suggests the problem is concentrated rather than systemic. A relatively small number of charter schools with very high rates are pulling the sector average up.

That concentration may be the most actionable finding in the data. If 17 charter schools account for the bulk of the sector's excess chronic absence, targeted intervention, not sector-wide policy, may be the more precise response. SB 58's uniform attendance definitions, now law, will standardize how schools count absences. What remains missing is the school-level reporting that HB 106 sought, which would make it possible to publicly identify which schools need intervention rather than relying on aggregate sector averages.

At Granite District^↗, one in three students is missing a month or more of school. At Uintah, it is one in two. In classrooms across both districts, teachers are building lesson plans around the students who showed up, knowing that tomorrow the roster will look different.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Only 1 in 8 NJ Districts Have Recovered to Pre-COVID Attendance

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Westfield, 2.3% of students were chronically absent last school year. Thirty miles south in Camden, the figure was 46.9%. Both numbers appear in the same state report, filed under the same metric, subject to the same 10% threshold that is supposed to trigger corrective action.

New Jersey's statewide chronic absenteeism rate fell to 14.9% in 2023-24, down from its pandemic peak of 18.1% two years earlier. That improvement is real, and it earned the state the second-lowest chronic absenteeism rate in the country, behind only Alabama. But the state-level number conceals a harder truth: of the 605 districts with pre-COVID comparison data, only 78 have returned to their 2018-19 attendance levels. That is 12.9%, roughly one in eight.

The other seven in eight are still operating in a world the pandemic made.

The distance from normal

Before COVID, 10.6% of New Jersey's 1.4 million public school students were chronically absent, defined as missing 10% or more of the school year. That baseline held steady for at least two years. Then it jumped to 13.1% in 2020-21, spiked to 18.1% in 2021-22, and has been falling since: 16.6% in 2022-23, 14.9% in 2023-24.

The trajectory looks encouraging in isolation. The state recovered 3.2 percentage points from its peak in two years, clawing back 1.5 points in the first year and 1.7 in the second. But it remains 4.3 points above the pre-COVID floor. At this pace, reaching the old baseline would take another two to three years, assuming the trend continues, which is far from certain.

Among individual districts, the recovery is not just slow. For most, it has not happened. The median non-recovered district sits 4.9 percentage points above its pre-COVID rate. More than 60% of districts are at least two points worse off. Seventy-one districts are more than 10 points above their pre-pandemic levels. Ninety-one districts, 14.0% of all districts reporting data, posted their worst chronic absenteeism rate on record in 2023-24.

Camden, Paterson, Trenton: the anchor cities

The state's worst chronic absenteeism concentrates in a handful of urban districts where rates were already elevated before the pandemic and then accelerated.

Camden City School District, which has been under state operation since 2013, recorded a 46.9% chronic absenteeism rate in 2023-24. That is 13.1 points higher than its pre-COVID rate of 33.8%. Nearly half the district's students missed at least 18 days of school. Paterson reached 35.7%, up from 27.6%. Trenton hit 34.0%, up from 30.0%.

At KIPP Cooper Norcross, a Renaissance school in Camden, chronic absenteeism reached 45.5% in 2023-24, more than double its pre-pandemic rate of 21.1%. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Camden Prep, another city Renaissance school, saw 50.2% of its students chronically absent, up from 30.0% before the pandemic. Andrew Bell, the superintendent in neighboring Woodbury, told the Inquirer: "There are so many nuances of why kids aren't in school."

Then there is Newark, which defied the pattern entirely.

The Newark exception

Newark Public School District, the state's largest, dropped from a 26.8% chronic absenteeism rate in 2018-19 to 11.5% in 2023-24, a 15.3 percentage point improvement. No other major district in the state came close. The district's chronic rate is now below the statewide average.

The improvement continued into the current school year. Newark reported that its overall chronic absenteeism rate dropped further to 10.4% in 2024-25, with an average attendance rate of 95.1%. Superintendent Leon credited "the hard work of our families, staff, and community partners." The district's Office of Attendance, Truancy Task Force, and attendance counselors are cited as driving the improvement.

What makes Newark's trajectory unusual is not just the magnitude but the consistency. Its chronic rate fell in three of the four post-pandemic years, while Camden and Paterson fluctuated wildly. Newark's 2024 rate of 11.5% is less than half its 2019 rate. The data does not suggest any structural or reporting changes that would explain this, though the state performance reports do not fully document methodology shifts at the district level. The improvement appears genuine.

The question is whether Newark's approach can be replicated. State Board member Nedd Johnson told Chalkbeat that "the house is on fire here when you have that percentage of students missing 18 days or more," referring to the statewide picture. Newark may have put out its fire. Most districts have not.

Every subgroup is worse off

The pandemic's attendance damage was not distributed evenly, and neither is the recovery. Every major student group in New Jersey has a higher chronic absenteeism rate in 2023-24 than in 2018-19.

Hispanic students saw the largest increase: 5.3 percentage points, from 13.1% to 18.4%. Economically disadvantaged students rose 5.2 points to 21.2%. English learners climbed 5.0 points to 17.2%. Students receiving special education services increased 4.5 points to 21.0%.

Black students had the highest absolute chronic absenteeism rate at 21.4%, though their increase since pre-COVID (3.8 points) was smaller than Hispanic or economically disadvantaged students. The Black-white gap in chronic absenteeism was 9.6 points before the pandemic, spiked to 17.5 points in 2020-21, and has narrowed back to 10.0 points. It remains wider than it was in 2018-19.

Students experiencing homelessness face a different order of magnitude: 40.9% were chronically absent in 2023-24. Students in foster care reached 27.4%.

Asian and Pacific Islander students had both the lowest rate (7.3%) and the smallest increase (2.5 points) since pre-COVID.

The charter sector gap

Charter schools entered the pandemic with chronic absenteeism rates roughly comparable to traditional districts: a median of 8.7% versus 7.4% in 2018-19. The pandemic blew that gap open. By 2021-22, the charter median hit 18.1% while traditional districts reached 13.2%. Two years of recovery have narrowed the difference, but charters still sit at a median of 14.6% compared to 11.5% for traditional districts.

The recovery rates tell a similar story. Among districts with pre-COVID comparison data, 12.4% of traditional districts have recovered versus 16.7% of charters. The charter sector's slightly higher recovery rate is misleading: charters fell further and have more ground to make up. Their median rate is still 3.1 points above traditional districts.

The pattern is likely driven partly by where charters operate. New Jersey's charter schools concentrate in the same urban districts, Camden, Newark, Paterson, where chronic absenteeism is most severe. A charter school in Camden faces many of the same attendance barriers as the traditional district, regardless of governance model.

What the state is doing about it

New Jersey requires every district with a chronic absenteeism rate above 10% to establish an Attendance Review Team and develop a corrective action plan. Before the pandemic, about 32% of schools exceeded that threshold. By 2022-23, more than 70% did.

In December, Governor Murphy signed S3776, establishing an 18-member Chronic Absenteeism Task Force charged with examining root causes and recommending interventions. The task force includes educators, community members, and researchers, and must report findings within one year. Chalkbeat reported that Nelida Valentin of the Princeton Area Community Foundation called for "a coordinated state approach" to "help strengthen and connect what is happening on the ground."

Separately, the state's NJ4S program, a student mental health support network launched in 2023, reached 281,972 students with Tier 1 services by mid-2025, an 18% increase over its first year. The program addresses one of the four root cause categories the state has identified: school aversion driven by anxiety and mental health challenges.

Whether these efforts are sufficient depends on what the data is actually measuring. If most of the post-pandemic increase reflects a genuine behavioral shift, where families now view occasional absences as more acceptable, policy interventions face a cultural headwind. If it reflects specific, addressable barriers such as transportation, health access, or safety concerns, then targeted programs can move the needle. The data cannot distinguish between these explanations. The task force is designed to try.

The 73.5% and the 24.8%

There is one encouraging signal buried in the district-level data. In 2023-24, 73.5% of districts improved their chronic absenteeism rate year-over-year, compared to 51.0% the year before. The direction of travel, for most districts, is correct.

But 24.8% of districts got worse between 2022-23 and 2023-24, even as the state rate fell. And improvement is not the same as recovery. A district that moved from 25% to 22% chronic absenteeism improved. It is still more than double its pre-COVID rate. The state's 2nd-place national ranking is real, but it reflects a nationwide collapse in attendance norms, not a return to pre-pandemic health.

The Rutgers State Policy Lab noted that New Jersey could learn from Alabama's targeted approach despite Alabama having a far higher share of economically disadvantaged students, 64.7% versus New Jersey's 38.1%. Relative performance against peer states is useful. It does not change the fact that 527 New Jersey school districts are operating with higher chronic absenteeism than they had before the pandemic, and 91 are at their worst levels ever recorded.

The task force has one year to produce recommendations. The 605 districts have students right now.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Four NC Students Chronically Absent as Recovery Loses Steam

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In the fall of 2022, the chronic absenteeism number that landed on desks at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction was staggering: 483,371 students, nearly a third of all children in public schools, had missed at least 18 days. Two years later, that number has dropped to 391,065. The improvement is real. It is also losing momentum at precisely the wrong time.

North Carolina's chronic absence rate fell from 31.2% at its peak to 25.0% in 2023-24, which means one in four students is still missing roughly a month of instruction every year. The state clawed back 4.5 percentage points in 2022-23, then managed only 1.8 points the following year. That deceleration matters: at the slower pace, the state will not return to its pre-pandemic baseline of 15.9% until at least 2029. The state's own target of 11% by 2030 would require cutting the rate by about 2.3 points per year, a pace North Carolina has never sustained.

The easy recoveries may be over

The trajectory since 2018 tells a familiar story with an unfamiliar ending. Before COVID, chronic absenteeism hovered around 15-16%, stable enough that it rarely made headlines. The pandemic blew the rate to 25.8% in 2020-21, then to a peak of 31.2% in 2021-22, even as schools fully reopened. The initial recovery in 2022-23, a 4.5-point drop, likely captured the students who had simply fallen out of habit during remote learning and returned to regular attendance once normalcy resumed.

The 1.8-point improvement in 2023-24 suggests that pool of "easy" recoveries has been largely exhausted. What remains is a harder problem: students whose absenteeism has become entrenched.

Research from UNC's Education Policy Initiative at Carolina underscores this concern. The share of students who were chronically absent in all three post-pandemic years quadrupled from 2.4% to 9.6% compared to the three pre-pandemic years. These are not students who occasionally miss a week for illness. They are students with deep, persistent attendance barriers, and they will require interventions far more intensive than attendance letters and robocalls.

149,673 more students than before

The percentage-point framing, while useful for tracking trends, obscures the human scale. In raw numbers, 391,065 North Carolina students were chronically absent in 2023-24. That is 149,673 more than the 241,392 who were chronically absent in 2018-19. Put differently: North Carolina has recovered 41% of the ground lost during the pandemic, but there are still enough additionally absent students to fill every seat in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.

The state's enrollment actually grew slightly over this period, from 1,519,962 to 1,566,774, meaning the rising chronic count is not an artifact of a larger denominator. More students are enrolled and more of them are missing school.

Who is missing school

The crisis does not fall evenly. Native American students have the highest chronic absence rate at 40.9%, meaning two in five miss at least 18 days per year. Black students follow at 31.5%, economically disadvantaged students at 34.0%, and students with disabilities at 32.4%. Asian students, at 11.3%, are the only subgroup that meets the state's 11% target.

English learners present a particularly troubling reversal. Before the pandemic, EL students actually had a lower chronic absence rate than the state average, 14.8% versus 15.9% in 2019. By 2024, they had flipped to 28.8%, nearly 4 points above the overall rate. Whatever protective factors once kept EL attendance strong, whether family culture, school engagement programs, or community networks, COVID disrupted them and they have not returned.

The 11% target and what it would take

North Carolina's AttendNC Counts initiative set an ambitious goal: reduce chronic absenteeism to 11% by 2030. That would mean cutting the rate by 14 points in six years, or roughly 2.3 points per year. The state managed 4.5 points in its best recovery year and 1.8 in its most recent. The math is not encouraging.

The 11% target would require not just maintaining the current pace of improvement but accelerating it, the opposite of what the data shows. It would also require closing the gap for the hardest-to-reach populations: the 9.6% of students who have been chronically absent every post-pandemic year, the rural districts where transportation remains a barrier, and the subgroups where rates exceed 30%.

"Some students are experiencing especially deep and persistent levels of absenteeism, and these students may face deeper underlying challenges to attendance and require more intensive intervention to recover." -- Swiderski, Fuller, and Bastian, UNC EPIC (2025)

North Carolina's current toolkit was built for the students who came back on their own. The 391,065 who did not will need something different: more counselors, more transportation options, more school-based health clinics. The 2024-25 data will show whether the deceleration was a temporary plateau or the start of a permanent stall.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Lewiston Is Growing While Maine Shrinks

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maine 2025-26 Enrollment.

Across the river from Auburn, which has lost 331 students since 2017, Lewiston^↗ is doing something almost no district in Maine can claim. It is growing. Three consecutive years of enrollment gains, from a trough of 5,085 students in 2023 to 5,349 in 2026, have made Maine's second-largest district an outlier in a state that just hit its lowest public school enrollment in at least a decade.

Only 13 of Maine's 254 districts managed to add students in each of the last three years. Lewiston led them all, gaining 264 students since 2023, more than any other district with at least 500 students. The growth is modest in absolute terms. But in a state losing more than 2,000 students a year, any district moving in the opposite direction demands attention.

A Mill Town That Found a Second Act

The story of Lewiston's enrollment trajectory is inseparable from the city's transformation over the past two decades. In 2001, a Somali refugee family discovered Lewiston's affordable housing and low crime and began spreading word to immigrant networks across the country. What followed was one of the most significant secondary migration events in New England history.

Today, approximately 7,500 immigrants live in Lewiston, a city of roughly 37,000. Somali, Congolese, Sudanese, and other African families have settled in what was once a declining post-industrial city. The Lewiston school district now serves students speaking 42 different languages, with Somali the most common non-English language. The district's student body is 42% Black and 46% white, a demographic profile that would be unremarkable in most American cities but is extraordinary in Maine, where 84.4% of all public school students statewide are white.

The enrollment numbers trace the arc of this transformation. Lewiston peaked at 5,574 students in 2019, lost 489 students through the pandemic years to bottom out at 5,085 in 2023, then reversed course. The 173-student gain in 2025 was Lewiston's largest single-year increase in the dataset.

The Twin City Divergence

The contrast with Auburn^↗ sharpens the picture. The two cities sit on opposite banks of the Androscoggin River, share a metro area, and are often spoken of in the same breath. Their school systems have followed opposite paths.

Auburn enrolled 3,639 students in 2017. By 2024, after seven consecutive years of decline, it had fallen to 3,179, a loss of 460 students (12.6%). Auburn has shown signs of stabilizing in the last two years, adding 63 and 66 students respectively, but it remains 331 students below its 2017 level.

Lewiston, by contrast, is only 149 students (2.7%) below its 2017 mark and closing the gap. The difference between the two cities is not geography, not economics, not school quality ratings. It is immigration. Auburn does not have a large immigrant community. Lewiston does.

Growing Pains Are Real

Lewiston's growth has created a problem most Maine districts would envy: the schools are running out of room. Superintendent Jake Langlais told city councilors in April 2025 that enrollment had surpassed 6,000 students (a figure that includes programs beyond the state's October count), adding roughly 1,000 students in four years. "I'm hopeful it grows more slowly, because if it grows too quickly, we will reach capacity all over the place," Langlais said.

The district purchased a former Central Maine Healthcare building on Main Street and requested $1 million in the city's Capital Improvement Plan to design its conversion into educational space. Mayor Carl Sheline framed the capacity crunch as a sign of vitality: "This is really a good problem to have."

The infrastructure challenge underscores a paradox in Maine's funding formula. Per-pupil funding follows students, so growing districts receive more state aid. But Lewiston's growth comes with disproportionate costs. The district's multilingual education department, led by Director Lysa McLemore, supports students across seven primary languages. The instructional programs these students receive carry higher per-pupil costs than general education, and the gap between state reimbursement and actual cost of multilingual services is a persistent pressure point.

The State Is Going the Other Direction

Lewiston's trajectory is notable precisely because Maine's is so bleak. The state lost 11,994 students between 2017 and 2026, a 6.6% decline to an all-time low of 168,923. The losses are accelerating: 1,307 in 2024, 1,562 in 2025, 2,134 in 2026.

Maine's demographics explain much of it. The state recorded 5,019 more deaths than births in 2025, and its total fertility rate of 1.45 births per woman ranks among the lowest nationally. Any population growth the state experiences comes entirely from migration.

That is precisely what makes Lewiston's story significant at scale. Statewide, Black student enrollment grew 50.3% between 2017 and 2026, from 6,256 to 9,403, driven overwhelmingly by immigrant families in Lewiston and Portland^↗. English learner enrollment grew 54.3% over the same period, from 5,376 to 8,293. These are the fastest-growing segments of Maine's student population, and they are concentrated in a handful of cities.

The January 2026 Disruption

The growth trajectory hit a sudden complication in January 2026 when ICE launched "Operation Catch of the Day" across southern and western Maine, arresting more than 200 people. Across Maine's most diverse districts, absence rates for multilingual students approached or exceeded 50% at the height of the operation, with more than 4,000 students statewide missing school on a single day.

In Lewiston, Superintendent Langlais confirmed that ICE had not conducted enforcement at schools, bus stops, or school events, but acknowledged a rise in absences as fear spread through the community. Mayor Sheline disputed ICE's characterization of the operation as targeting criminals, noting that agents had detained "a Lewiston mother of an autistic son" and "a father of a newborn child."

The enrollment data in this analysis reflects the state's October count, taken months before the ICE operation began. Whether immigration enforcement affects Lewiston's 2027 enrollment count, through families leaving or keeping children home, is the most consequential open question facing the district.

A building on Main Street

The tension between a city running out of classroom space and a state running out of students is the Lewiston story in miniature. The district now accounts for 3.17% of Maine's total enrollment, up from 3.04% in 2017. That share will keep climbing as long as the state shrinks and Lewiston does not. After the January ICE operations, the more urgent question is whether the families who filled those classrooms will still be in Lewiston when the October count arrives.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Eight Louisiana Students Now Attends a Charter School

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Louisiana 2025-26 Enrollment.

In five years of comparable data, Louisiana's charter sector has added 6,914 students. Its traditional parishes have lost 32,171. Both facts describe the same state, the same years, and the same funding formula. The difference is which direction each line points.

Charter entities enrolled 81,717 students in 2025-26, or 12.4% of the state's public school total. That is up from 10.9% in 2021-22, the first year Louisiana reported charter entities as distinct districts. The 1.5 percentage-point gain may sound modest, but it masks an asymmetry: charter enrollment grew 9.2% over the period while traditional enrollment fell 5.3%.

The shape of the charter sector

Louisiana's charter landscape is unusual. Five entities, each reported as a district-level unit, account for all charter enrollment in the state data. Two of them dominate.

Orleans Parish^↗, the all-charter aggregate representing New Orleans public schools, is the largest at 43,182 students. It has been shrinking, down 722 students (1.6%) since 2022, reflecting the city's ongoing demographic contraction. Type 2 Charters^↗, the BESE-authorized schools that can enroll students from anywhere in the state, is second at 36,673 students, up 31.3% from 27,921 in 2022. The remaining three entities are small: Recovery School District-Baton Rouge (902), Recovery School District-LDE (742), and Office of Juvenile Justice (218).

The growth story is almost entirely a Type 2 story. These BESE-authorized schools added 8,752 students in five years, more than offsetting the combined declines of every other charter entity. Type 2 enrollment jumped from 27,921 to 30,693 between 2022 and 2023, then to 34,049 in 2024, before plateauing at 34,060 in 2025 and surging again to 36,673 in 2026.

Traditional parishes: only seven grew

While the charter sector expanded, 67 of 76 traditional parishes lost students between 2022 and 2026. The losses were broad-based. East Baton Rouge Parish^↗ lost the most in absolute terms, shedding 2,652 students (6.5%). Lafayette Parish^↗ lost 2,422 (7.7%). Jefferson Parish^↗ lost 2,023 (4.3%). St. Tammany Parish^↗ and Caddo Parish^↗ each lost roughly 1,700.

Only seven traditional parishes gained enrollment over the period. Calcasieu Parish^↗ was the standout, adding 783 students (2.8%), possibly reflecting post-hurricane recovery in the Lake Charles area. The others added between 6 and 107 students each.

The year-over-year pattern is striking. Traditional parishes lost 5,925 students in 2023, 8,047 in 2024, moderated to 2,775 in 2025, then plunged 15,424 in 2026, the largest single-year traditional loss on record. Charter enrollment, by contrast, gained in three of four years, dipping only slightly in 2025 (by 175 students) before rebounding by 1,972 in 2026.

What a growing charter share does not tell you

Charter share can rise for two reasons: charter enrollment grows, or total enrollment shrinks. In Louisiana, both are happening simultaneously, which makes the share gain partly mechanical. If charter enrollment had stayed flat at its 2022 level while traditional enrollment fell by 32,171, charter share would have risen from 10.9% to 11.4% on traditional losses alone. The actual charter share of 12.4% reflects genuine charter growth on top of that compositional shift.

The distinction matters for policy. A charter sector that grows by attracting new students into public education is different from one that grows by absorbing a larger fraction of a contracting pie. Louisiana's data cannot distinguish between these mechanisms at the state level. Some portion of Type 2 charter growth likely represents families leaving traditional parishes, but without student-level transfer data, the share attributable to transfers versus new enrollment versus families who would otherwise homeschool or attend private school remains unknown.

The New Orleans paradox

New Orleans operates as an almost entirely charter system, yet its enrollment is declining. Orleans Parish lost 722 students between 2022 and 2026, a trend driven by falling birth rates rather than sector competition. New Schools for New Orleans, a nonprofit that tracks the city's school landscape, has documented that the city's kindergarten class is the smallest in over a decade, 16% smaller than in 2014, and that only 86% of available school seats are filled.

"Around 700 fewer babies were born in New Orleans in 2020 than in 2015." — New Schools for New Orleans

The city's charter schools have begun consolidating in response. InspireNOLA, one of the larger charter management organizations, merged two schools into a single campus in 2024 to reduce empty seats by 500 across the system.

BESE authorization and the GATOR factor

Type 2 charter growth depends on BESE's willingness to authorize new schools and expand existing ones. Louisiana law defines Type 2 charters as schools chartered directly with BESE that can enroll students from across the state, giving them a geographic reach that locally authorized charters lack. LDOE's charter school program grant application materials target new seats in districts where schools have been rated academically unacceptable for three or more years, rural districts, and areas where public school choice options are limited.

A separate pressure on traditional enrollment may come from the LA GATOR Scholarship Program, the state's first education savings account, which launched in 2025-26 with approximately 6,000 participating students and $43.5 million in funding. GATOR recipients leave the public school enrollment count entirely, removing both the student and the per-pupil funding. The program is set to expand eligibility in phases through 2027-28, which could accelerate traditional enrollment loss without appearing in charter enrollment figures.

What to watch

The charter sector's 2025 dip, when it lost 175 students year-over-year before rebounding by 1,972 in 2026, is worth monitoring. If traditional losses continue at their 2026 pace of 15,424 per year while charter enrollment grows at roughly 2,000, charter share would cross 14% by 2028. That would still leave Louisiana below national leaders like Arizona and Florida, but it would represent a structural shift in how the state delivers public education.

In New Orleans, where InspireNOLA merged two campuses in 2024 to eliminate 500 empty seats, the charter sector is demonstrating one of its structural advantages: it can close a school without a community meeting or a board vote that dominates local news for weeks. Parish school boards in Caddo, Jefferson, and East Baton Rouge have all faced angry parents and civil rights complaints over school closures driven by the same enrollment math. The charter sector's ability to open and close schools by design is a flexibility that traditional parishes, bound to existing campuses and attendance zones, do not share.

That flexibility will matter more as the pie continues to shrink. Under the Minimum Foundation Program, funding follows students. Every student who leaves a traditional parish for a Type 2 charter, a GATOR-funded private school, or another state takes per-pupil dollars with them. The charter sector's 12.4% share is small enough to be manageable. Its direction -- up, in every year but one -- is not.

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One in Three Caldwell Students Are Chronically Absent

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

At Canyon Springs High School in Caldwell, three out of every four students are chronically absent. The alternative school's 74.4% rate is the third-highest of any school in Idaho with at least 100 students, but it is not an outlier in its own district. Jefferson Middle School sits at 43.7%. Syringa Middle School at 37.3%. Caldwell Senior High at 33.8%.

Caldwell District^↗, with 4,931 students in Canyon County's agricultural heartland, has the highest chronic absenteeism rate among Idaho's 25 large districts: 34.1%. That is more than double the state average of 14.6%, and it is higher than the district's rate when Idaho first began publishing this data in 2020-21.

Getting worse, not better

Most Idaho districts can point to some improvement from the pandemic peak. Caldwell cannot. Its rate stood at 31.9% in 2020-21, spiked to 38.6% in 2021-22, fell back to 30.9% in 2023-24 — then climbed again to 34.1% in 2024-25. The W-shaped trajectory suggests the district faces structural attendance barriers that brief improvement periods cannot overcome.

The scale of the problem sets Caldwell apart from its peers. Mountain Home, the next-worst large district at 24.9%, is nine percentage points lower. Vallivue — a neighboring Canyon County district of similar demographics — sits at 21.3%. The statewide median for large districts is roughly 14%.

Across every subgroup, the rates are high

Caldwell's attendance problem is not confined to one population. Hispanic students — roughly 64% of the district's enrollment — face a 35.6% chronic rate. White students are at 30.6%. English learners, at 34.8%, mirror the district-wide pattern.

The consistency across subgroups points to community-wide factors rather than any single demographic driver. Caldwell sits at the center of Canyon County's agricultural economy, where seasonal work patterns, limited public transportation, and rural health care access create attendance barriers that school-level interventions struggle to overcome.

The district launched an "Every Day Matters" attendance campaign, part of a statewide push promoted by the Idaho State Department of Education. The data suggests these efforts have not reached the scale needed in a district where a third of students are habitually absent.

The school-level picture

Within Caldwell, the variation is enormous. Canyon Springs High School's 74.4% rate reflects its role as an alternative school serving students who have already disengaged from traditional settings — high absence rates are partly baked into its mission. But even removing Canyon Springs, the pattern remains:

Jefferson Middle School: 43.7% (757 students)
Syringa Middle School: 37.3% (671 students)
Caldwell Senior High: 33.8% (1,343 students)
Washington Elementary: 31.9% (492 students)
Sacajawea Elementary: 30.1% (359 students)

Only Wilson Elementary (20.3%) and Van Buren Elementary (24.6%) fall below 25% — and even those rates would be among the worst in most Idaho districts.

The middle schools stand out. At Jefferson, nearly half the students miss at least 18 days of school. These are the years when attendance patterns often set the trajectory for high school completion.

What a 34% rate costs

Under Idaho's Average Daily Attendance funding model, every empty seat is a revenue loss. Roughly 1,680 of Caldwell's 4,931 students cross the chronic threshold, each missing at least 18 days a year. The cumulative attendance losses represent millions in foregone state funding for a district that, by every demographic measure, needs the money most.

Caldwell's rate has been above 30% in every year of available data. The district has never known a period where chronic absenteeism was not a crisis: 31.9%, 38.6%, 31.1%, 30.9%, 34.1%. No sustained improvement. No downward trend. The district that needs the most help showing up is the one where showing up remains hardest.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Four Districts, One City, 6,476 Fewer Students

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The four districts that share responsibility for educating Wilmington's children lost 6,476 students over the past decade, an 11.0% decline that left them serving 52,641 in 2024-25, down from 59,117. During that same span, the rest of Delaware boomed: Appoquinimink^↗ gained 3,867, Cape Henlopen^↗ gained 2,217, and the charter sector nearly doubled. The state as a whole hit an all-time enrollment high.

The Redding Consortium for Educational Equity voted 19-2 in December 2025 to study merging those four districts into one. The question the enrollment data raises is whether a merger would fix a structural problem or merely consolidate four shrinking systems into a single larger one.

The gap between two Delawares

The divergence is not subtle. Indexed to 2014-15, the rest of Delaware's districts grew to 120.3% of their starting enrollment by 2024-25. The Wilmington four fell to 89.0%. That 31-point gap represents more than just headcount: it represents a shift in where Delaware's students are, and where its per-pupil funding flows.

The four districts' share of statewide enrollment dropped from 42.5% to 35.0% over the decade. In a state with a unit-based funding formula that dates to the 1940s, fewer students means fewer units, fewer teachers, and a structural mismatch between fixed facility costs and declining revenue.

Christina's outsized losses

Not all four districts declined equally. Christina^↗ alone accounts for 4,006 of the 6,476 lost students, a 21.8% decline that dwarfs the losses at Red Clay^↗ (-1,393, or 7.2%), Colonial^↗ (-620, 6.1%), and Brandywine^↗ (-457, 4.0%).

Christina is Delaware's only non-contiguous district. Its boundaries stretch from the Newark suburbs to an island of downtown Wilmington neighborhoods, a legacy of 1980s court-ordered desegregation. That geography creates 15-mile commutes for some families. Board member Shannon Troncoso told Spotlight Delaware that the arrangement "makes it really prohibitive for parents to even be involved."

The non-contiguous structure also exposes Christina to a particular form of school choice pressure. Newark Charter School^↗ grew from 1,952 to 3,115 students over the decade, a 59.6% increase. Its five-mile enrollment radius captures many of Christina's suburban families in the Newark area while excluding Wilmington families who live in Christina's non-contiguous section. Odyssey Charter School^↗, which draws from Red Clay's territory west of Wilmington, grew from 948 to 2,375, a 150.5% gain.

Who left, and who stayed

White enrollment across the four districts fell from 21,994 to 16,620, a loss of 5,374 students, or 24.4%. That single subgroup accounts for most of the combined net decline. Black enrollment held essentially flat, declining by just 43 students (0.2%), while Hispanic enrollment grew by 1,611 (14.9%).

The shift is most pronounced in Christina, where white enrollment dropped 40.5%, from 5,264 to 3,133. White students now make up 21.8% of Christina's enrollment, down from 28.7%. Black students represent 47.7%, up from 40.9%.

Separately, the instructional profile of the four districts changed substantially. English learner enrollment grew from 6,582 to 7,642, pushing the EL share from 11.1% to 14.5%.

The special education surge

The most striking compositional shift is in special education. Across the Wilmington four, the share of students receiving special education services rose from 15.9% in 2014-15 to 26.3% in 2024-25. In absolute terms, that is 4,457 additional students classified for special education, even as total enrollment fell by 6,476.

Christina and Colonial now each serve special education populations exceeding 29% of enrollment. The instructional programs these students receive carry higher per-pupil costs: specialized staffing, smaller class sizes, mandated services under federal law. A district losing total enrollment while gaining special education students faces a structural mismatch between its shrinking revenue base and its growing service obligations.

Whether the rise reflects improved identification, families choosing these districts specifically for their special education programs, or students with fewer resources being less likely to exercise school choice is unclear from enrollment data alone. All three mechanisms likely contribute.

Where the students went

The Wilmington districts' losses did not disappear from the state. Delaware gained 11,546 students statewide, and the growth concentrated in two corridors.

The Middletown corridor added the most: Appoquinimink gained 3,867 students (39.9%), driven by housing development that has expanded the town from one square mile to roughly 13. Caesar Rodney^↗, south of Dover, added 663 (8.0%). Smyrna^↗ gained 563 (10.1%).

Sussex County's beach corridor was the other growth engine. Cape Henlopen added 2,217 students (45.0%), Indian River^↗ gained 1,787 (17.7%), and Laurel^↗ added 169 (7.3%). Sussex County's population grew 29.3% between 2010 and 2022, drawing retirees, remote workers, and families from Philadelphia and Washington.

The charter sector crossed 10.0% of statewide enrollment in 2024-25, up from 6.3% a decade earlier. Charters added 6,336 students across 19 entities. Newark Charter and Odyssey Charter alone account for 2,590 of those gains.

The merger question

The Redding Consortium's 19-2 vote in December 2025 directed the American Institutes for Research to develop a consolidation plan for the four districts. Red Clay teacher Mike Mathews told WHYY the rationale plainly:

"Nothing is going to change if we aren't willing to change. I know that we need to go big."

Not everyone agreed. Christina teacher Michelle Suchyj raised a concern that resonates with the enrollment data:

"I don't want my kids in the city of Wilmington to get lost in an even bigger pool than they're already lost in."

The plan has already slipped. In March 2026, the consortium pushed its deadline from summer 2026 to the end of the calendar year. State Sen. Tizzy Lockman, the consortium's co-chair, acknowledged the tension: "We feel that urgency, but also the call to not be over hasty and yield a sloppy proposal."

What a merger would inherit

A merged Northern New Castle County district would enroll roughly 52,641 students with a combined demographic profile unlike any current Delaware district: 31.6% white, 39.5% Black, 23.7% Hispanic, and 26.3% receiving special education services. It would inherit Christina's non-contiguous geography, Colonial's high-poverty schools, Red Clay's charter competition, and Brandywine's relative stability.

The underlying enrollment trend would not change. The families who left for Appoquinimink, Newark Charter, and Sussex County beaches did not leave because of where district boundaries fell. They left for newer schools, higher-rated systems, growing communities, and programs that matched their preferences. A single district with the same schools in the same neighborhoods would still face those competitive pressures.

A 2023 AIR study found Delaware underfunds high-need students by $600 million to $1 billion. The state's Opportunity Funding program provides roughly $66 million annually to support low-income and multilingual learners, but advocates argue that figure remains insufficient relative to the scale of the gap. Whether consolidation or a new funding formula would reach Wilmington's classrooms faster is the political question that enrollment data alone cannot answer.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

180,000 Students Still Missing Too Much School

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2023-24, Tennessee's chronic absenteeism rate fell 1.3 percentage points, the largest single-year improvement since the pandemic began. Attendance directors across the state had reason to think momentum was building.

Then the 2024-25 numbers came in: 0.6 points. Half the prior year's gain. The rate sits at 18.3%, down from the 20.3% peak in 2021-22 but still 5.2 percentage points above the pre-pandemic baseline of 13.1% that the Tennessee Comptroller documented for 2018-19. That translates to 180,343 students missing more than 10% of school days, roughly 29,000 more than were chronically absent in 2020-21, which was itself an elevated COVID year.

Tennessee is not alone in this deceleration. Nationally, the annual drop in chronic absenteeism fell from 2.6 percentage points to just over one between 2022-23 and 2024-25. But the state's trajectory carries particular weight because Tennessee ranks third nationally in post-COVID math recovery, proof that its schools can close pandemic gaps when the system pushes. Attendance has not responded with the same urgency.

The easy gains are gone

The year-over-year pattern tells a clear story of diminishing returns. In 2021-22, chronic absenteeism spiked 4.8 points from the prior year. The following year it barely moved, falling 0.1 points. Then came the 1.3-point drop in 2023-24, followed by last year's 0.6-point improvement.

At the current pace of 0.6 points per year, Tennessee would not return to its 2020-21 level of 15.5% until roughly 2030. That 15.5% figure was itself a COVID-era rate. Reaching the Comptroller's pre-pandemic baseline of 13.1% would take until approximately 2034 at this trajectory.

The pattern mirrors what RAND researchers describe as "sticky" absenteeism in more than half of urban districts nationally: the students who returned to regular attendance after 2022 were likely those with the fewest barriers. The families still absent tend to face transportation problems, housing instability, or health care gaps that a phone call home cannot resolve.

Where the recovery stalled, and where it didn't

The statewide average obscures a split between grade levels. K-8 schools have recovered 51.2% of their COVID-era spike, pulling down from 18.1% to 15.9%. High schools have recovered just 44.0%, and the pace there has nearly flatlined: the rate fell 1.2 points in 2023-24 but only 0.2 points last year, landing at 23.6%. Nearly one in four high schoolers is chronically absent.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the state's largest district with 105,186 students, is moving in the wrong direction entirely. Its chronic absenteeism rate has risen every year in the data: 19.0% in 2020-21, 25.5%, 28.9%, 29.5%, and now 30.2% in 2024-25. That four-year climb of 11.2 percentage points means nearly one in three Memphis students is chronically absent, and the district's 31,785 chronically absent students alone account for 17.6% of the statewide total.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools^↗ has poured resources at the problem -- 78 attendance liaisons, a summer door-knocking campaign that enrolled over 1,000 unregistered students, daily calls home when a student is marked absent. The rate kept climbing. The barriers families cited most often were not apathy but logistics: immunization paperwork and bus routes.

Davidson County^↗ offers a counterpoint. Its rate fell from 28.9% in 2020-21 to 23.3% in 2024-25, a 5.6-point recovery. Davidson made its fastest progress in 2023-24, dropping 3.7 points in a single year. The contrast with Memphis is instructive. Davidson started the period in worse shape, at 28.9% versus Memphis's 19.0%. Four years later, Davidson has pulled down to 23.3% while Memphis has climbed to 30.2%. The two districts' trajectories crossed and then diverged, leaving Davidson 6.9 percentage points lower.

The equity gap has not budged

Every major subgroup has improved since the 2022 peak, but the distance between groups looks nearly identical to where it was before the spike.

Black students face a chronic absenteeism rate of 26.5%. White students are at 15.5%, up from 12.0% in 2020-21. The Black-White gap stands at 11.0 percentage points, compared to 11.9 before the spike. The pandemic did not create this disparity; it widened it temporarily and then it returned to approximately the same size.

Students from economically disadvantaged families carry the heaviest burden at 29.9%, a rate 11.6 points above the statewide average and the slowest-recovering major subgroup. Only 35.9% of the COVID-era spike for economically disadvantaged students has been recovered, compared to 41.7% for all students. Special education students show a similar pattern: 22.5%, with 38.9% of their spike recovered.

Hispanic students stand out as the sole group to fully return to their 2020-21 rate, moving from 18.0% to a peak of 20.2% and back to 18.0%. English learners, a group that overlaps heavily with Hispanic students, actually improved beyond their 2020-21 starting point, falling from 18.8% to 16.3%.

A funding formula with a blind spot

Tennessee's TISA formula, which replaced the BEP in 2023-24, calculates base funding using Average Daily Membership across nine reporting periods. A student who is enrolled but absent still counts toward ADM, though the formula implicitly penalizes districts with high absenteeism because those students are less likely to be enrolled at all and absent students generate no instructional contact hours. The disconnect means a district like Memphis can have 31,785 chronically absent students funded at their full ADM weight even as the instructional programs those students need go undelivered.

The Achievement School District sits at the extreme end of this pattern -- 53.7% chronic absenteeism, more than half its remaining students missing class regularly. The ASD is closing after a decade, its story an illustration of what happens when attendance erosion compounds beyond the point of intervention.

The deceleration is not mysterious

AEI's national analysis argues that early pandemic-era gains came from students who were marginally absent returning when schools normalized. The families still missing tend to face interrelated barriers -- unstable housing, unreliable transportation, chronic health conditions, caregiving responsibilities -- that do not yield to a phone call home or a truancy notice.

Tennessee's three-tier truancy intervention system, which escalates from universal supports to juvenile court referral after seven unexcused absences, was in place before the pandemic. The system was designed for outlier cases. At 18.3%, nearly one in five students triggers it.

Memphis is closing five schools this year with up to 10 more by 2028, displacing 1,200 students whose attendance patterns will be disrupted again. Nashville has demonstrated that large urban districts can bend the curve. The gap between those two trajectories will determine whether Tennessee's 180,000 chronically absent students become 160,000 or 200,000.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Alliance Public Schools Cut Chronic Absenteeism from 48% to 20% in Four Years

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Alliance Public Schools^↗ sits 380 miles west of Omaha in the Nebraska panhandle. It enrolls 1,232 students. And it has achieved something that most of Nebraska's larger, better-resourced districts have not: a dramatic, sustained reduction in chronic absenteeism.

In 2020-21, Alliance's chronic absenteeism rate hit 48.3 percent -- nearly half of all students missing at least 10 percent of the school year. By 2024-25, it had fallen to 19.8 percent. That is a 28.5 percentage-point improvement over four consecutive years, the largest decline of any district with 500 or more students in the state.

Four years, every year better

The improvement was not a one-year correction that flattered the trend line. It came in steady, annual increments: from 48.3 percent to 43.6 percent (2021-22), to 39.2 percent (2022-23), then a dramatic drop to 23.3 percent (2023-24), and a further decline to 19.8 percent (2024-25).

The 2023-24 improvement of 15.9 percentage points in a single year stands out. Something changed fundamentally in Alliance that year. The Nebraska Department of Education recognized the district's approach: an assistant principal took personal responsibility for building positive relationships with students, created a mentorship program ensuring every student had a trusted adult in the building, and launched positive attendance messaging throughout the school.

Where Alliance stands now

At 19.8 percent, Alliance is now below the statewide average of 21.5 percent -- a position that would have been difficult to imagine four years ago when it was one of the worst-performing districts in the state. Among western Nebraska peers, Alliance sits in the middle of the pack: below Ogallala (25.2 percent) and Scottsbluff (23.8 percent) but above Chadron (16.0 percent) and Sidney (6.5 percent).

The district's data for 2018-19 is unavailable (chronic absence counts are suppressed), so a direct comparison to pre-COVID levels is not possible. But the 2019-20 rate of 32.9 percent -- already elevated before COVID hit -- suggests that Alliance's current 19.8 percent may represent the lowest chronic absenteeism the district has experienced in the modern data window.

What makes Alliance instructive

Alliance is not the only Nebraska district that has achieved a dramatic turnaround. South Sioux City Community Schools dropped from 37.6 percent to 11.2 percent (a 26.4-point improvement). Sidney Public Schools went from 30.7 percent to 6.5 percent (24.2 points). Chase County Schools fell from 41.5 percent to 13.8 percent (27.7 points).

What these districts share, beyond the numbers, is scale: they are all mid-sized or small communities. The top ten improvers in Nebraska are all districts with fewer than 4,000 students. None of Nebraska's large urban or suburban districts appear on the list.

That pattern raises a question: is turnaround possible at the scale of Omaha (50,265 students, 44.7 percent) or Lincoln (40,365 students, 27.7 percent)? The relationship-based, every-student-known approach that worked at Alliance may be harder to replicate in a district with 50 times as many students. But the Alliance example proves that the problem is not intractable -- it is a matter of whether the ingredients that work at 1,200 students can be adapted for 50,000.

Alliance Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Missouri Public Schools Just Hit Their Lowest Enrollment in at Least 25 Years

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The number on the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's enrollment report is one that no superintendent, school board member, or state legislator wanted to see: 855,081 students in the state's public schools for the 2025-26 school year. It is the lowest figure in at least a quarter century of available data, falling below even the disrupted pandemic years, and it arrives not as a surprise but as the continuation of a trend that has been quietly accelerating for two decades.

Missouri peaked at 894,843 students in 2000-01. It has lost 39,762 since then — a 4.4% decline that sounds modest until you examine the pace at which the losses have mounted.

A slow leak becomes a flood

For most of the 2000s, Missouri's enrollment barely moved. Between 2001 and 2009, the state averaged a loss of just 220 students per year — rounding error for a system serving nearly 900,000 children. Individual years bounced up and down. The trajectory was flat enough that it didn't demand attention.

The 2010s brought a steeper slide. From 2010 through 2018, annual losses averaged roughly 1,000 students per year. Still manageable. Still abstract enough to land in budget footnotes rather than headlines.

Then came the era that changed the math entirely.

Since 2019, Missouri has averaged a loss of 3,858 students every year — nearly four times the pace of the prior decade. And unlike the earlier eras, when gains in one year could offset losses in the next, the recent decline has been relentless. Of the last five years, four have been negative.

The 2022 cliff

The single worst year tells its own story. In 2021-22, Missouri lost 20,068 students in a single school year — the largest non-artifact decline in 26 years of data, and one that cut across 397 of the state's 553 districts.

What makes Missouri's experience unusual is the timing. Many states saw their enrollment crater immediately in 2020-21, when COVID closed schools and families scrambled for alternatives. Missouri's initial pandemic losses were remarkably mild: just 1,728 students between 2020 and 2021. The real collapse came a full year later, suggesting that families who stayed put during the chaos eventually made permanent decisions — homeschooling, private schools, moves out of state — once the immediate crisis passed.

The state clawed back 4,061 students in 2022-23, hinting at a bounce. It didn't hold. The three years since have each been negative: down 1,103, then 2,817, then 2,972. The 2022 cliff was not a one-time shock. It was a step down to a new, lower baseline.

Two states in one

The statewide average conceals a geographic reality that is more dramatic — and more consequential — than the topline number suggests.

St. Louis City^↗ enrolled 43,420 students in 2000-01. By 2025-26, that number has fallen to 16,211 — a loss of 27,209 students, or 62.7%. It is the single largest absolute enrollment loss of any district in the state. The district lost its full accreditation, regained it, then lost it again in January 2026. The enrollment decline and the governance crisis have fed each other for more than a decade.

Across the state, Kansas City 33^↗ has followed a remarkably similar trajectory. From 35,642 students in 2001 to 13,964 in 2026, the district has shed 60.8% of its enrollment. Together, the state's two anchor cities account for 48,887 of Missouri's 39,762-student statewide loss — meaning the rest of the state, collectively, has actually grown if you subtract the urban collapse.

But the losses around St. Louis extend well beyond the city limits. Normandy Schools Collaborative^↗, just north of St. Louis, has lost 53.6% of its enrollment. Riverview Gardens^↗ is down 31.3%. Ferguson-Florissant^↗ has shed 24.1%. The inner ring of suburban districts that once absorbed families fleeing the city is now losing families to the next ring out.

And that next ring is thriving. Wentzville^↗ has grown from 5,742 students to 17,538 — a 205% increase that included 20 consecutive years of growth before a brief COVID-era dip. North Kansas City 74^↗ reached an all-time high of 20,915. Grain Valley^↗, east of Kansas City, posted 22 consecutive years of growth before briefly dipping in 2024, climbing from 1,659 to 4,466 students over the full period.

The pattern is a textbook enrollment donut. Families leave the urban core. Inner-ring suburbs absorb them for a decade, then begin declining themselves as the next generation moves further out. The growth concentrates in exurban districts with new housing stock. Parkway^↗ is down 20.0%. Hazelwood^↗ is down 14.9%. Francis Howell^↗ is down 12.6%. Rockwood^↗ is down 10.4%. These are not distressed districts — they are some of the most respected school systems in the state, and they are all shrinking.

173 districts at their lowest point

The decline is not just an urban or suburban story. Of the 550 districts with sufficient enrollment history, 173 recorded their all-time lowest enrollment in 2025-26 — roughly one in three. Only 31 districts are at all-time highs.

The districts hitting bottom span the state's geography: rural counties where birth rates have fallen for a generation, small towns that lost their manufacturing base, inner-ring suburbs caught in the donut's outward drift. The 173 figure excludes 2012-13, a year when 36 charter school districts were missing from the state's data — a gap that makes that year's numbers unreliable for comparison.

Where Missouri goes from here

At the state's five-year compound annual growth rate of -0.53%, Missouri's public schools would fall below 850,000 students by the 2027-28 school year and below 840,000 by 2030. These are not forecasts — they are projections of recent trend, and recent trend has been consistent enough to take seriously.

Springfield^↗, now the state's largest district at 24,004 students, has been the steadiest of Missouri's major systems — holding within a narrow band while the two anchor cities collapsed around it. But even Springfield dipped by 1,539 students in 2022 before partially recovering. No district is immune to the forces driving the decline.

Missouri's legislature convened a school funding formula review task force in 2024, charged with evaluating whether the state's per-pupil distribution model still fits the system it funds. The task force's work now unfolds against a specific backdrop: 173 districts at their smallest size in recorded history, losses accelerating rather than leveling off, and a formula that sends less money to every district that shrinks. The math is no longer abstract.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Hispanic Enrollment Dipped for the First Time in 2026

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Iowa 2025-26 Enrollment.

For 10 years, Hispanic enrollment was the one line on Iowa's enrollment chart that always went up. While white enrollment fell by 49,582 students between 2015 and 2026, Hispanic growth added 17,974 over the same span, offsetting roughly a third of the loss in most years and keeping the state's total decline manageable. In 2025, Hispanic enrollment hit a record 68,710 after gaining 2,816 students in a single year.

In 2026, that line bent downward. Hispanic enrollment fell to 68,513, a loss of 197 students, or 0.3%. It is the first non-COVID decline in the dataset. The only other dip was 45 students during the pandemic disruption of 2021, which immediately reversed into a gain of 2,430 the following year. The 2026 drop is more than four times larger.

The stabilizer that stopped stabilizing

The structural role of Hispanic enrollment in Iowa is more important than the raw number suggests. At 13.8% of total enrollment, Hispanic students are the state's second-largest racial group, but their function in the enrollment equation has been disproportionate. Between 2016 and 2020, Hispanic growth offset an average of 81% of annual white losses. Between 2022 and 2025, it offset 28% to 360%, depending on the year.

In 2026, the offset disappeared. White enrollment fell by 8,415 students. Hispanic enrollment fell by 197. For the first time, both groups shrank simultaneously. The result: Iowa lost 7,670 students, its worst non-COVID year and more than double the 3,820 it lost in 2025.

The timing matters because white losses are accelerating. Iowa lost 1,601 white students in 2016. It lost 8,415 in 2026. Without Hispanic growth as a partial counterweight, the decline curve steepens considerably.

Where the losses concentrated

Des Moines^↗ lost 317 Hispanic students, more than the entire statewide net loss of 197. The state's largest district has the largest Hispanic student population (9,425 in 2026, 32.6% of district enrollment), and its decline alone accounted for 161% of the statewide drop. Other districts' gains partially netted out Des Moines' loss, but not enough.

The pattern extended into Iowa's meatpacking corridor, the chain of small towns where Hispanic families have sustained schools that would otherwise have emptied. Marshalltown^↗ (56.3% Hispanic) lost 41 students. Denison^↗ (65.2% Hispanic) lost 40. Ottumwa^↗ lost 35. Postville (74.8% Hispanic) lost 29.

But the causes are not uniform across towns. Brendan Knudtson, the superintendent at Postville^↗, said Postville's drop had nothing to do with immigration enforcement. The class of 2025, he said, was "historically one of, if not the largest, class over the years, peaking at 74 students," followed by another outsized class of 62. Two unusually large graduating classes leaving back-to-back created a one-year dip that the data cannot distinguish from a policy-driven departure.

Knudtson confirmed that immigration does shape Postville's enrollment over time. "Our enrollment at times is affected by immigration policy," he said. "COVID and the halt on refugees affected us, and three years ago we saw a large summer increase due to the changes in how family units were handled at the border." In an October 2025 interview with Iowa Public Radio, he put it more bluntly: without immigration, Postville would be like many small rural towns with "not much left."

Storm Lake^↗ (57.8% Hispanic) was the notable exception, gaining 22 Hispanic students. The reasons for Storm Lake's resilience are not clear from enrollment data alone.

Statewide, 146 districts lost Hispanic students, 151 gained them, and 32 were flat. The loss was not uniform. It was concentrated in the largest Hispanic-serving districts.

Three forces pulling in the same direction

The most likely driver is reduced immigration into Iowa. Iowa State University sociologist David Peters told Iowa Public Radio that international immigration into Iowa dropped by approximately half in 2025 compared to 2024, following federal enforcement changes. ICE arrested more than 1,200 people in Iowa between January and October 2025. More than 200 Haitian workers lost jobs at the JBS facility in Ottumwa in November 2025.

"More than 90% of Iowa's population growth between 2020 and 2025 came from international immigration." -- David Peters, Iowa State University, Iowa Public Radio, Feb 2026

Des Moines Public Schools, where more than 25% of students are English language learners, has acknowledged the connection. DMPS officials told Axios Des Moines that while the district cannot track departures by immigration status, staff report a correlation between enforcement activity and family withdrawals.

A second contributing factor is Iowa's Education Savings Account program. The ESA program grew to 41,044 participants in 2025-26, up from 27,866 the prior year, costing $314 million. Public school enrollment fell by 1.53%. The Iowa Department of Education noted that projections developed before the ESA program already showed a downward trend, but the program's expansion coincides with the acceleration. Whether ESA disproportionately drew Hispanic families is unknown; the program does not publish demographic breakdowns.

A third factor operates on a longer timeline. Iowa's birth rate is 1.7 births per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1. Hispanic births as a share of Iowa's total rose from 10.0% (2018-2020 average) to 11.2% (2021-2023 average), according to March of Dimes data. But a rising share of a shrinking total still means fewer children entering schools.

The share paradox

Hispanic enrollment fell in absolute terms, but its share of total enrollment actually rose, from 13.6% to 13.8%. This is because total enrollment dropped even faster. The denominator shrank more than the numerator.

This creates a measurement paradox: a district superintendent reading share data would see Hispanic representation growing. A superintendent reading headcount data would see it shrinking. Both are technically correct. The headcount tells the more operationally useful story, because staffing, bilingual program capacity, and Title III funding all follow the absolute number of students, not the percentage.

What the data cannot resolve

The enrollment data cannot distinguish between families who left the state, families who withdrew children to avoid enforcement risk, families who moved to private schools through the ESA program, and families whose children aged out of the K-12 system. Knudtson's explanation of Postville's loss illustrates the problem: what looks in the aggregate like an enforcement story turns out, in at least one town, to be a graduating-class-size artifact. A decline of 197 students across a population of 68,000 is within the range that any one of these mechanisms could explain on its own.

The 2021 comparison is instructive but imperfect. That year's dip of 45 students during COVID immediately reversed. Whether 2026 follows the same pattern or marks the beginning of a plateau depends on whether the driving force is temporary (a single-year enforcement shock) or structural (reduced immigration flows plus declining birth rates). The enrollment data recorded in October 2026 will be the first real test.

The rural stakes

If Hispanic enrollment does not recover, the consequences fall hardest on Iowa's smallest communities. Peters estimated that without immigration, rural Iowa would have lost 10% to 12% of its population in the last decade instead of 2%. Ben Murrey of the Common Sense Institute Iowa calculated that halting foreign immigration for four years would cost the state 11,000 labor force participants and $300 million in gross domestic product.

For school districts, the math is more immediate. Iowa provides roughly $8,000 per student in state funding. Each of the 197 lost Hispanic students represents that amount in district revenue. But the geographic concentration means Des Moines absorbs the equivalent of $2.5 million in lost funding from Hispanic enrollment alone, while Marshalltown, Denison, and Postville each lose funding on populations they cannot afford to lose.

The question facing Iowa's meatpacking corridor is whether the 2026 dip is a one-year pause in a decade-long growth trend, or the first year of a new pattern. Postville added 226 Hispanic students between 2015 and 2025. It lost 29 in a single year. The difference between those two trajectories reshapes whether these schools can sustain the bilingual programs, translated materials, and cultural infrastructure they built for a population that, until this year, was always growing.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Hawaii Falls Below 165,000 Students for the First Time

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Hawaii 2025-26 Enrollment.

Correction (March 31, 2026): An earlier version of this article identified the last year of enrollment growth as 2019-20. The gain of 441 students occurred in 2018-19. Derived figures have been updated accordingly.

In 2024, Hawaii public schools lost 901 students. That looked like a floor. This year, they lost 3,425.

Total enrollment fell to 163,651 in 2025-26, the lowest figure in 16 years of state records and the first time Hawaii has dipped below the 165,000 mark. The state has now shed 23,199 students since peaking at 186,850 in 2013-14, a 12.4% decline that erased roughly one of every eight seats in the system. The 2025-26 drop is the largest single-year loss outside of the pandemic, and it arrived after what had appeared to be a stabilization: losses of 2,969 in 2022-23, then just 901 in 2023-24, then 2,232 in 2024-25, and now 3,425.

The pattern is not deceleration. It is re-acceleration.

Seven years of unbroken losses

Hawaii has not added students since 2018-19, when a gain of 441 students brought enrollment to 181,278. In the seven years since, the state has lost 17,627 students, a 9.7% contraction. That 2018-19 uptick was a brief exception sandwiched between two eras of decline.

The pre-COVID losses were modest. Between 2015-16 and 2019-20, the state lost a net 1,296 students over five years, an average of 259 per year. Since the pandemic, annual losses have averaged 2,906, more than 11 times the pre-COVID pace. The COVID crash of 2020-21 removed 4,647 students in a single year. What followed was not recovery but continuation: -3,263, then -2,969, a brief pause at -901, and now two consecutive years of deepening losses.

The 2025-26 drop of 3,425 is the third-largest single-year loss in the dataset, behind only the 2020-21 pandemic crash (-4,647) and the 2014-15 drop (-4,466, which is partly a kindergarten counting methodology change). In the post-pandemic era, it stands alone as the worst.

The housing cost exodus

The most direct explanation is that families are leaving. Hawaii's population fell to 1,432,820 as of July 2025, a decline of roughly 22,500 residents since 2020. Domestic outmigration ran at 8,876 people in fiscal 2025 alone, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Housing costs are the dominant push factor. The median single-family home price on Oahu reached $1,160,000 in March 2025, more than double the national average. University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization analysis has found that outmigration from Hawaii skews young, disproportionately pulling away the cohort most likely to be starting families.

"This is yet another sign of the affordability crisis that Hawaii residents deal with every day." -- Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, January 2026

Declining births compound the problem. Hawaii recorded 14,964 births in 2024, a nearly 20% drop from 18,444 a decade earlier. Those shrinking birth cohorts are now arriving at kindergarten age: K enrollment in 2025-26 stood at 11,637, down from 13,933 in 2015-16, a 16.5% decline.

Every island is losing

All four counties sit at record lows. Honolulu^↗ accounts for the bulk of the damage: 20,854 students lost since 2014, a 17.1% decline that represents 90% of the statewide drop from peak. Maui^↗ County lost 3,081 students (-14.3%) over the same period, with the August 2023 Lahaina wildfires accelerating an existing trend.

Kauai^↗ County fell 12.9% from its 2014 peak. Hawaii County^↗, the Big Island, lost the smallest share (-6.6% from 2014) but still sits at its lowest enrollment on record.

In 2025-26, every county lost students. Kauai fell the fastest in percentage terms (-2.6%), followed by Honolulu (-2.5%), Hawaii County (-2.5%), and Maui (-1.5%). The uniformity is notable: no island is growing, and no island is close to flat.

Charter schools grow, traditional schools empty faster

Hawaii's 40 charter schools enrolled 13,371 students in 2025-26, their highest figure in the dataset. Charter share has risen from 4.7% to 8.2% since 2010-11, nearly doubling. The Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission reported three consecutive years of enrollment growth, with a 5.2% increase in 2024-25 alone.

The divergence masks how deep the traditional system's losses run. HIDOE schools (the traditional sector) enrolled 150,280 students in 2025-26, down from 177,010 in 2013-14, a loss of 26,730 students (-15.1%). In 2025-26 alone, traditional schools lost 3,702 students while charters gained 277. The total system is shrinking; the traditional system is shrinking faster.

Charter growth does not fully explain the traditional sector's decline, however. Even if every charter student had remained in a traditional school, HIDOE would still have lost more than 20,000 students from peak. The more likely dynamic: charters are absorbing some families who would otherwise leave the public system entirely, blunting total enrollment loss rather than causing it.

The pipeline is narrowing

Kindergarten enrollment fell to 11,637 in 2025-26 while 12th grade stood at 12,095. The K-to-12th-grade ratio dropped to 96.2, meaning fewer students are entering than leaving. This inversion, which first appeared in 2024-25 (ratio: 98.7), signals that absent a major reversal in birth trends or in-migration, enrollment losses will compound for at least another decade.

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that Hawaii will see a 33% decline in high school graduates by 2041, falling from roughly 11,500 graduates in 2023 to just over 7,600. That is the steepest projected drop in the western United States and one of the sharpest nationally. That projection is downstream of the kindergarten numbers Hawaii is recording today.

34 schools below the funding threshold

The fiscal consequences are already visible. Thirty-four schools now enroll fewer than 250 students, up from 19 a decade ago. That 250-student mark is the estimated minimum needed to adequately fund basic operations. Eight elementary schools fell below $1.38 million in annual budgets in 2023-24, with Maunaloa Elementary on Molokai operating on roughly $900,000 for 59 students.

The state has not closed a school since 2011, when Queen Liliuokalani Elementary in Kaimuki was shut amid strong community pushback. Rather than pursue closures directly, the DOE announced in September 2025 that it would pursue "district optimization," redrawing attendance boundaries to rebalance enrollment before considering consolidation.

"As a result of the feedback received, the Department will be revising its approach to addressing shifts in enrollment and adjusting the timeline accordingly." -- Deputy Superintendent Tammi Oyadomari-Chun, Honolulu Civil Beat, September 2025

Redistricting changes could take effect as early as fall 2026. The first school consolidation studies are not expected until spring 2028. Rural complexes face the sharpest near-term pressure: enrollment in the area covering Lanai, Molokai, Hana, and West Maui is projected to fall 25% by the end of the decade.

What 2026-27 will test

The re-acceleration from -901 to -3,425 in two years raises a question: is 2025-26 a spike or the new baseline? The kindergarten pipeline suggests it is closer to baseline. With births running below 15,000 annually, each incoming cohort is smaller than the one it replaces. The K-to-12th-grade inversion is structural, not cyclical.

Hawaii's enrollment crossed below 165,000 this year. At the current trajectory, it will cross below 160,000 within two years. Civil Beat has reported that the DOE projects an additional loss of 14,600 students by the end of the decade. If that holds, Hawaii would fall below 150,000 by 2030. The redistricting timeline gives the state until 2028 to act. The enrollment data is not waiting.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Half of Connecticut Districts Hit All-Time High Chronic Absenteeism — Before the Real Crisis

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The 2019-20 school year ended abruptly. Connecticut closed its schools in March 2020, cutting the academic calendar by roughly three months. Fewer school days should mean fewer chances to miss enough days to be labeled chronically absent.

Instead, the opposite happened. Connecticut's statewide chronic absenteeism rate climbed to 12.2% — its highest point in nine years of data — and 78 of 187 districts with available data hit their own all-time highs. The worst part: this was just the opening act. By 2021-22, the rate would more than double to 23.7%.

The mid-decade improvement that vanished

Connecticut's attendance story is a V-shaped trap. The statewide chronic absence rate fell from 11.1% in 2012 to a trough of 9.6% in 2016 — a 1.5 percentage-point improvement that coincided with new truancy legislation (Public Act 15-225) and heightened attention to attendance tracking. For four years, the numbers moved in the right direction.

Then they reversed. The rate crept back up: 9.9% in 2017, 10.7% in 2018, a brief dip to 10.4% in 2019, and the 12.2% spike in 2020. By the time COVID closed schools, Connecticut had already erased all its mid-decade progress and then some. The 2020 rate exceeded the 2012 starting point by 1.1 percentage points.

The 2020 spike of +1.8 percentage points was the largest single-year jump in the nine-year dataset. But the reversal started earlier. The +0.8 percentage-point increase in 2018 was the second-largest, and it came during a full, uninterrupted school year — no pandemic, no closures, no excuses.

138 of 165 districts worsened in a shortened year

The 2020 spike was not concentrated in a few urban districts. Using a gender-averaged proxy that extends coverage to 165 districts, 138 — 84% — saw their chronic absenteeism rate increase from 2019 to 2020, averaging a 1.9 percentage-point jump.

Only 27 districts improved.

Among 187 districts reporting total chronic absence data across at least five years, 78 — 42% — hit their all-time worst chronic absence rate in the COVID-shortened 2020. Just 8 reached their all-time low.

The districts at their worst included familiar names: Hartford^↗ at 27.9%, Waterbury^↗ at 21.0%, Capitol Region Education Council at 20.5%. But the list also included smaller districts that rarely make headlines — Sterling^↗ at 19.1%, Thompson^↗ at 17.8%, Coventry^↗ at 12.7%, Sherman^↗ at 9.6%. The crisis was not just urban.

A paradox that has never been fully explained

The 2020 finding is counterintuitive. The state defines chronic absenteeism as missing 10% or more of school days in a year. With schools closing in March 2020, students had roughly 120 days of instruction instead of the usual 180. Missing 12 days would make a student chronically absent rather than the usual 18.

Several explanations compete. The most straightforward: the students who were already marginally attending simply stopped before schools officially closed. Families dealing with economic disruption, health fears, or lack of childcare pulled children out in late February and early March 2020, before governors issued closure orders. A Fox 61 investigation found that chronic absenteeism was already rising during the pandemic as families navigated uncertainty.

An alternative explanation: the lower denominator made chronic absence easier to trigger. With fewer total days, even a modest number of absences crossed the 10% threshold. This statistical artifact would make the 12.2% rate look worse than it truly was in behavioral terms.

Both explanations are likely true simultaneously, and the data cannot disentangle them.

What the baseline reveals about the recovery

The pre-COVID data matters because it defines the target. Connecticut's chronic absenteeism rate peaked at 23.7% in 2021-22, then declined to 17.2% by 2024-25 — a three-year recovery driven partly by the state's LEAP home-visitation program, which paired trained community members with chronically absent families and produced a 15 percentage-point attendance improvement within six months of intervention.

"Students in pre-K through fifth grade experienced an eight percentage point increase in attendance nine months after the first LEAP visit, while students in grades six through 12 experienced a sixteen percentage point increase." — Education Commission of the States, 2023

But 17.2% is still 65% above the pre-COVID baseline of 10.4% in 2019 — and the pre-COVID baseline was itself higher than the 9.6% trough of 2016. The recovery is real. It is also incomplete relative to where the state was before the pandemic, which was itself worse than the best the state had achieved.

The trough was fragile

The most sobering implication: Connecticut's mid-2010s improvement was not durable. The state spent four years getting chronic absenteeism from 11.1% to 9.6%, then gave it all back in four more. Whatever drove the improvement -- legislative attention, better reporting, genuine intervention -- did not create a new floor.

The current recovery is powered by $10.7 million in federal COVID recovery funds and $7 million in annual state allocations for LEAP. The program's evidence base is strong -- it was featured as a national best practice by the federal Department of Education in 2023, and more than 30,000 students have returned to regular attendance. But the federal recovery funds will expire. And the pre-COVID data offers a clear warning about what happens when the money and attention move on.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

One in Three Nevada Students Missing Too Much School

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Roughly 155,000 Nevada students were chronically absent in 2024-25. That is one in three students statewide who missed 10% or more of enrolled school days -- the equivalent of nearly four weeks of instruction.

The enrollment-weighted chronic absenteeism rate across Nevada's 685 schools stands at 32.6%, nearly double the pre-COVID school-average rate of 19.9% recorded in 2018-19. Even the best-performing large district in the state, Washoe County, has a weighted rate of 30.5%. Only charter schools managed to crack below 25% as a sector.

The numbers behind the number

At Clark County School District^↗, the nation's fifth-largest, roughly 106,000 of 302,043 students were chronically absent, a weighted rate of 35%. That single district accounts for nearly 70% of all chronically absent students in the state.

Washoe County^↗, the second-largest traditional district with 63,628 students, has a weighted rate of 30.5%, meaning about 19,400 students crossed the chronic threshold. Charter schools under the State Public Charter School Authority collectively enrolled 60,666 students at a 23.3% weighted rate, the lowest of any major enrollment grouping.

The rural picture is more varied but often worse. Esmeralda County^↗, with just 78 students, has the highest weighted rate of any district at 48.7%. Lyon County^↗, the highest among districts with more than 1,000 students, stands at 40.8%. Mineral County^↗ stands at 36.5%, and Lander County^↗ at 35.5%.

The distribution has shifted

The scale of the crisis becomes clearer when you look at how schools sort. Before the pandemic, 17.3% of Nevada schools had chronic rates below 10%, what most states would consider a healthy attendance level. In 2024-25, just 3.6% of schools hit that mark -- 25 out of 685.

Meanwhile, nearly half of all schools now have chronic rates above 30%. Before COVID, 13.7% did. And 70 schools, about one in ten, have rates above 50%, meaning a majority of students at those schools are chronically absent.

The middle has hollowed out. Where the pre-COVID distribution peaked in the 10-20% range, the 2024-25 distribution peaks in the 25-35% range. Schools that would have been considered outliers six years ago are now average.

What 155,000 means

Nevada's Pupil-Centered Funding Plan allocates dollars based on enrollment, not attendance, which means every one of these 155,000 students generates per-pupil funding even as they miss a month or more of school. The state spent approximately $10,500 per pupil in 2024-25. That amounts to roughly $1.6 billion flowing to educate students who are not consistently present to receive it.

Applied Analysis, a Las Vegas research firm, has estimated that unaddressed chronic absenteeism could cost Southern Nevada $14.4 billion over the next 20 graduating classes, based on reduced lifetime earnings and tax revenue for students who fall behind academically. Research from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that students who miss 10% or more of school in any year are significantly less likely to graduate on time.

Communities In Schools of Nevada, which served 98,000-plus students statewide through its integrated student support model, has expanded rapidly since the pandemic. But the scale of 155,000 chronically absent students dwarfs even ambitious intervention programs.

The data underneath

Two important caveats shape these numbers. First, the statewide weighted rate of 32.6% is calculable only for 2024-25, because Nevada did not report enrollment alongside chronic absenteeism data in prior years. Earlier years use an unweighted mean of school rates, which gives the same weight to a 50-student rural school and a 2,500-student Las Vegas high school. The unweighted mean for 2025 is 31.7%, reasonably close to the weighted figure.

Second, the Nevada Department of Education's official statewide chronic rate for the free-or-reduced-price-lunch subgroup is 26.9%, substantially lower than the 32.6% weighted school-level figure. The difference likely reflects both the subgroup definition (FRL, not all students) and the aggregation method. Neither number is wrong; they measure different things.

What both measures agree on: the problem is immense, it has not recovered, and it touches every corner of the state.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Fremont Schools Are Now Majority Hispanic

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2010, voters in Fremont, Nebraska passed an ordinance designed to drive out undocumented immigrants. The measure required renters to sign declarations of legal presence and employers to use the E-Verify system. The vote was 57% to 43%. At the time, Fremont Public Schools^↗ was 77.7% white and 19.8% Hispanic.

Fifteen years later, Hispanic students make up 50.5% of the district. White students are at 45.2%. The ordinance is still on the books. The crossover happened anyway.

The numbers behind the X

The crossover came in 2024-25, when Hispanic enrollment reached 2,594 students and white enrollment fell to 2,460. By 2025-26, the gap widened: 2,632 Hispanic students to 2,360 white. In percentage terms, Hispanic students went from 49.1% to 50.5% while white students dropped from 46.6% to 45.2%.

The transformation was not sudden. It was a 21-year compression. In 2004-05, Fremont enrolled 3,786 white students and 570 Hispanic students, a ratio of more than six to one. White enrollment has since fallen by 1,426, while Hispanic enrollment has grown by 2,062. The district added 718 students over that span, a 16.0% gain. Fremont is not shrinking. Its composition is changing.

The pace of the shift accelerated in every period measured. White share declined at 1.3 percentage points per year from 2005 to 2010, 1.7 points per year from 2010 to 2015, 1.8 points per year from 2015 to 2020, and 2.5 points per year from 2020 to 2026. The ordinance did not slow the curve. Nor did the 2014 referendum that reaffirmed it by 59.5% of voters.

The plants that built a new Fremont

Three meat-processing facilities anchor the local economy. The Hormel hog plant, described as "the nation's largest producer of Spam," has operated for decades. Fremont Beef processes cattle. And in 2019, Costco opened a rotisserie chicken facility operated as Lincoln Premium Poultry, employing roughly 1,200 workers and processing two million chickens per week.

The enrollment data lines up with these economic anchors. Between 2019-20 and 2023-24, Fremont added 464 students, its strongest four-year run since the data begins. Hispanic enrollment accounted for all of the net growth and then some, rising by 681 students in that span while white enrollment fell by 236.

Mark Jensen, Fremont's city council president, put the economic reality plainly to NBC News in 2024:

"We need these people. We need this work done. This is what feeds the nation and the world."

A newer wave of workers from Guatemala, many speaking the indigenous K'iche' language rather than Spanish, has added complexity. Over 40% of recent Guatemalan arrivals speak K'iche', prompting the local hospital to hire a K'iche' translator and Costco's plant to offer language classes. The school district added 600 non-English-speaking students in the four years before 2024, according to the same NBC report.

One of 13, but the most contested

Fremont is not an outlier in Nebraska's data. Thirteen districts with 500 or more students now enroll more Hispanic students than white students. Grand Island Public Schools^↗ is 61.8% Hispanic. Columbus Public Schools^↗ is 54.9%. Crete Public Schools^↗ is 64.9%. Lexington is 77.5%. Schuyler is 88.0%.

What makes Fremont different is the political backdrop. Most of these crossover districts are smaller towns where meatpacking arrived quietly. Fremont's transformation became national news. The 2010 ordinance was challenged by the ACLU, scrutinized by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and profiled by NBC News as a case study in the tension between economic dependence on immigrant labor and political resistance to immigration. As recently as September 2024, the city council voted 6-1 to keep the ordinance fully funded rather than redirect enforcement money to hire six firefighters, according to local reporting.

The enforcement mechanism has always been thin. Renters sign a declaration and pay $5 for an occupancy license. No proof of legal status is required, which is part of why the ordinance survived legal challenges. The city clerk's office told NBC News in 2024 that it processes three to five new declarations per day from migrants and other applicants. The city has spent more than $1.3 million defending the ordinance in court.

A statewide pattern, accelerating

Fremont's crossover is part of a broader transformation. Statewide, Hispanic students grew from 9.9% to 21.6% of Nebraska enrollment between 2005 and 2026. White students fell from 79.8% to 62.4%. The shift is most visible in meatpacking corridors: Grand Island, Columbus, Lexington, South Sioux City, Schuyler, and now Fremont.

At the same time, Fremont's total enrollment peaked at 5,333 in 2023-24 and has since declined by 117 students over two years. Whether that dip reflects normal fluctuation, a post-Costco plateau, or the beginning of a reversal is too early to say with two data points.

What comes next for a divided city

Fremont is the 11th-largest district in Nebraska, enrolling 5,216 students across a city of 27,000. The school district is now demographically unrecognizable from the city's voter rolls. The 2020 Census counted the city as roughly 77% white and 19% Hispanic, numbers that describe the adult population but not the classrooms. The gap between the electorate that sustains the ordinance and the student body it notionally targets will only widen.

The enrollment data cannot answer whether the ordinance deterred any families from settling in Fremont. What it can show is that white share declined faster after 2010 than before it, and that Hispanic enrollment grew in every single year of the 22 covered by this dataset. The policy meant to resist demographic change didn't stop it. Fremont had one of the fastest demographic shifts of any mid-sized district in the state. Only Ralston, with a 41.5-point drop in white share over the same period, changed faster among districts with 2,000 or more students.

The question going forward is not whether Fremont's schools will be majority-Hispanic. They already are. It is whether city government will catch up to what the school rosters have been showing for 20 years.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

North Dakota's Chronic Absence Recovery Has Stalled — One in Five Students Still Missing Too Much School

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

North Dakota was one of the first states in the country to get students back in classrooms. By December 2020, 98% of the state's schools were operating in person. By August 2021, every school was open five days a week. The expectation, reasonable at the time, was that reopening early would mean recovering early.

Four years later, one in five North Dakota students is still chronically absent, and the rate has not budged in two years.

The state's chronic absenteeism rate hit 22% in 2021-22, the first full post-pandemic school year. It dropped two percentage points to 20% in 2022-23. And then it stopped. In 2023-24, the rate was 20% again, unchanged. North Dakota has recovered exactly 20% of the way back to its pre-COVID baseline of 12%.

The plateau nobody planned for

Before the pandemic, about 12% of North Dakota students missed more than 10% of school days, a figure that held steady in both 2017-18 and 2018-19. COVID pushed the rate to 15% in 2020-21, then to 22% the following year even as schools were fully open. The two-point drop in 2022-23 looked like the beginning of a recovery arc.

It was not.

The zero movement in 2023-24 suggests that whatever drove the initial two-point improvement -- re-established routines, attendance campaigns, the fading of acute COVID disruptions -- has run its course. What remains is structural. Students have settled into new patterns of absence that the pandemic amplified but did not create.

At the current pace, which is no improvement at all, North Dakota will not return to its pre-pandemic 12% until it finds an entirely different approach. Even the optimistic scenario -- resuming the one-point-per-year decline from 2022 to 2023 -- would push full recovery to roughly 2032.

The crisis behind the number

The 20% statewide figure masks disparities that are far worse. Homeless students have a 53% chronic absence rate -- a majority missing more than a month of school every year. Native American students are at 39%. Hispanic students sit at 35%, and economically disadvantaged students at 32%.

White students, who make up the large majority of North Dakota's enrollment, have a 15% chronic rate. That figure is itself three percentage points above the pre-COVID level of 12% for all students. Even the state's least-affected population has not returned to normal.

The gap between the highest and lowest subgroups is 38 percentage points. It has widened since the pandemic, not narrowed.

What 20% means in practice

North Dakota's roughly 115,000 public school students include about 23,000 who are chronically absent at the current 20% rate. Before the pandemic, that number was closer to 14,000. The state has approximately 9,000 more chronically absent students than it did five years ago, and the flow of students back toward regular attendance has stopped.

North Dakota funds schools based on Average Daily Membership, counting enrolled students whether they show up or not. Districts do not lose per-pupil revenue when students miss school, removing one lever that attendance-linked funding states use to push improvement.

The mental health dimension

Thirty-five percent of the state's high schoolers reported feeling sad or hopeless in 2023, and 18% seriously considered suicide. The school counselor ratio falls below the American School Counselor Association's recommended level, with 87% of students underserved.

Students dealing with anxiety, depression, or trauma miss more school. Whether North Dakota's attendance plateau reflects an unaddressed mental health crisis, a workforce shift that has parents less available to enforce attendance, or a cultural change in how families treat daily school presence is unclear. What is clear is that reopening schools was not enough, and eight percentage points of excess chronic absenteeism show no sign of resolving on their own.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Bozeman HS Grew 32% While Montana Shrank

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2017, Bozeman voters approved a $125 million bond to build a second high school. By the time Gallatin High opened its doors in fall 2020, the city's population had grown 43% in a decade. The bet was that the students would keep coming.

Eight years into the data, they have. Bozeman H S^↗ district, which operates both Bozeman High and Gallatin High, has grown every single year since 2018, adding 687 students for a 31.8% gain. No other district in Montana has matched that streak. The second-longest current growth run, six years, belongs to Denton Elem, a district of 44 students in rural Fergus County.

A staircase in a state that's falling

Montana lost 8,502 public school students between 2023 and 2026, the sharpest three-year decline in the nine years of available data. Statewide enrollment sits at 142,071, its lowest point on record.

Bozeman HS went the other direction. Its enrollment climbed from 2,157 in 2018 to 2,844 in 2026. The biggest single-year jump, 146 students, came in 2021, the year Gallatin High opened and absorbed freshmen, sophomores, and juniors from the newly divided attendance boundaries. But the growth did not stop after that redistribution settled. The district added 109 more students in 2022, 126 in 2023, and 112 in 2024.

The pace slowed in 2025 to 45 students, then ticked back up to 63 in 2026. Even at its weakest, the district grew. The state, by contrast, lost 4,068 students in 2025 alone.

But the recent growth isn't entirely organic. In 2025, Montana mandated open enrollment, removing districts' ability to turn away nonresident students. Bozeman now enrolls 177 nonresident students, 124 of them from Belgrade. "Without that change, overall enrollment in Bozeman would have decreased, not increased," Waterman said. A similar dynamic exists at the elementary level: recent legislation allowing public schools to serve three- and four-year-olds has padded K-5 numbers. "Without those newly authorized programs," Waterman said, "this year's Bozeman's K-5 enrollment would have decreased — not increased — overall."

The growth streak is real. But its most recent chapters owe as much to legislative changes as to population growth.

Bozeman HS now accounts for 2.0% of all Montana public school enrollment, up from 1.47% in 2018. That number is small in absolute terms, but the trajectory is striking: a district growing 35 percentage points faster than the state it sits in.

Two Bozemans

Montana's split-district structure, a legacy of rural governance where communities created separate elementary and high school districts, makes Bozeman's story unusually legible. The elementary district and the high school district serve the same community, but their enrollment curves have diverged sharply.

Bozeman Elem^↗ peaked at 4,888 students in 2020. It has since fallen to 4,587, a decline of 301 students from that peak, and sits 118 below its 2018 level. While not at an all-time low (that was 4,496 in the COVID year of 2021), the elementary district has been flat or declining for four of the last six years.

The indexed view makes the divergence visible. Bozeman HS has climbed to 131.8 on an index where 2018 equals 100. Bozeman Elem hovers near 97.5. The same city, the same housing market, the same population boom, two different enrollment stories.

Mike Waterman, the district's executive director of business and operations, put a number on it. "Kindergarten classes for the four years immediately preceding the pandemic averaged 517 students, but in the years since, that average has dropped to 467 students," Waterman said. "We have this information well in advance, so these smaller class sizes are something we've long been anticipating."

The birth rates behind those smaller classes have been visible for years. "Local birth rates dropped every year from 2016-2020," Waterman said. A pandemic-era spike produced temporarily larger cohorts, but births have since resumed their decline. Those pre-pandemic children are the ones filling Bozeman and Gallatin High right now. When the smaller post-2016 cohorts reach ninth grade around 2030, the high school pipeline narrows.

The district sees the math clearly. "We expect enrollment to flatten out at all grade bands and, as a result, our building capacity will likely be sufficient for the foreseeable future," Waterman said.

The housing market reinforces this pattern. Median home prices in Bozeman reached $711,000 as of spring 2025, with single-family homes averaging $932,000. Between 2018 and 2023, Montana's median home sales price rose 89.6% while median household income rose only 27.9%. New families with young children are a different economic proposition than the established households whose teenagers are already enrolled.

The Gallatin Valley corridor

Bozeman did not grow in isolation. East Helena K-12^↗, about 90 miles northwest and increasingly a commuter community for workers priced out of both Bozeman and Helena, has surged 57.6% since 2018, from 1,230 students to 1,938. Voters there approved a $12 million bond to build a new elementary school and add classrooms at the middle school. As of late 2024, the community had roughly 980 new homes proposed in subdivisions over the next five to 10 years.

Belgrade^↗, the community closest to Bozeman and once part of the same growth story, has reversed. Combined Belgrade Elem and Belgrade H S^↗ enrollment peaked at 3,489 in 2020 and has since fallen 13.0% to 3,036 by 2026. Part of that drop is now quantifiable: 124 Belgrade students currently attend Bozeman under the new open enrollment mandate. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported Belgrade's population growth rate dropped from 8.1% in 2021 to 2.3% by 2024, but the open enrollment mandate means some of Belgrade's enrollment loss is literally Bozeman's gain.

Two campuses, one identity

Bozeman and Gallatin High are more alike than their rivalries suggest. "Each building has its own unique culture and identity, which creates healthy competition and rivalry," Waterman said. "At the same time, they're both extremely collaborative and row together on key district initiatives."

The district invested heavily in making the split equitable. "Great foresight and planning went into establishing enrollment boundaries that made the buildings as equitable as possible in terms of student numbers, demographics," Waterman said. The gap between the two schools has narrowed from 92 students last year to 87 this fall, and free and reduced lunch rates are comparable — 16% at Bozeman High, 20% at Gallatin. The current junior class represents the widest enrollment disparity between the buildings; once that cohort graduates, future classes are expected to be roughly the same size.

Bozeman against the field

Among Montana's major high school districts, Bozeman's 31.8% growth since 2018 stands alone. The next-closest, Missoula HS, gained 6.1%. Billings HS, the state's largest, barely moved: up 1.1%, or 58 students, over eight years. Great Falls HS grew 1.0%. Helena HS lost 15.7%, shedding 451 students.

The elementary picture across those same cities is uniformly bleak. Billings Elem (10,737), Great Falls Elem (6,668), Missoula Elem (4,962), Helena Elem (4,836), and Butte Elem (2,834) are all at their lowest enrollment on record. Belgrade Elem (2,129) also hit its all-time low. Six of Montana's eight largest elementary districts are at record lows simultaneously.

Bozeman Elem is not among them. It sits 91 students above its 2021 trough. But the direction since 2020 has been consistently down.

What powers the streak

Gallatin County added roughly 1,055 residents between 2023 and 2024 and about 8,000 over the four-year span since 2020. Notably, about a quarter of Gallatin County's recent population growth came from natural increase, with births (1,141) exceeding deaths (686). The county's younger demographic profile distinguishes it from Flathead County, where migration drove virtually all growth.

Bozeman's tech sector has been a pull factor. The Montana High Tech Business Alliance has consistently ranked Bozeman among the state's leading employment centers for technology jobs, attracting the kind of young professionals whose children are now aging into the high school pipeline.

But Waterman sees a broader flattening across the valley. "K-12 enrollment has leveled off, even though the area continues to grow," he said. That holds across public, private, and home school enrollment in Gallatin County — all three have been flat since 2020. "We don't have data to support this claim," Waterman said, "but believe it's largely a cost of living issue: families with school-aged children simply can't afford to live here."

The growth engine is cooling. Montana Free Press reported that domestic in-migration to Montana fell 75% in 2024 compared to 2021. Bozeman's population growth rate dropped from nearly 3% in 2021 to 1.4% by 2024. The year-over-year enrollment gains at Bozeman HS tell a similar story of deceleration: from triple-digit annual additions in 2021-2024 to 45 and 63 in the last two years.

What the elementary numbers signal

Montana's school funding formula ties most of its budget calculations to ANB, the average number of students belonging to a district on two count days. For Bozeman HS, eight years of growth have meant eight years of expanding budgets. The district could afford a $125 million bond and a second high school because the students were there to justify it.

The elementary numbers are a leading indicator of what comes next. The cohorts now filling Bozeman's K-5 classrooms are smaller than the ones graduating from Gallatin and Bozeman High. When those smaller elementary classes reach ninth grade around 2030 or 2031, the high school district will face the same arithmetic that has already caught up with Great Falls, Helena, and Billings. Bozeman's administrators have said as much publicly.

Whether the streak ends at eight years or stretches a few more depends on variables no enrollment dataset fully captures: how many families can still afford to move to a city where the average single-family home costs nearly a million dollars, and how much of the recent growth reflects real demand versus legislative artifacts that redistributed students who were already in the system.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Mississippi Has Lost Students Every Year for a Decade

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Mississippi 2025-26 Enrollment.

Mississippi's public school system has not grown in a decade. In 2025-26, the state enrolled 424,534 public school students, an all-time low in the data and the tenth consecutive annual decline. Not once since the 2015-16 school year, when enrollment peaked at 487,195, has the number ticked upward. The cumulative loss of 62,661 students, a 12.9% decline, is roughly equivalent to emptying every classroom in the state's 10 largest districts outside Jackson and DeSoto County.

What makes this year's number particularly striking is the acceleration. From 2021-22 through 2024-25, annual losses averaged 1,828 students, small enough that administrators could describe the trajectory as stabilization. Then 2025-26 arrived: a loss of 10,725 students, 5.9 times the prior four-year average and the second-worst single-year decline on record after the COVID crash of 2020-21.

Four years of losses before the pandemic

The instinct is to blame COVID. But Mississippi was already losing more than 5,000 students a year before the pandemic arrived. Between 2015-16 and 2019-20, the state shed 21,236 students at an average rate of 5,309 per year. The pandemic year of 2020-21 was an accelerant, not a cause: 23,390 students vanished in a single year, a 5.0% drop that dwarfed anything before it.

What followed was an apparent stabilization. The 2021-22 loss was just 581 students, and 2022-23 saw a loss of 1,703. But this was a mirage. Mississippi never recovered a single student lost during COVID. The "stability" of 2022-2025 was simply the decline pausing to catch its breath before 2025-26 delivered another body blow.

The compound annual growth rate across the full decade is -1.37%. At the three-year average pace of the most recent years (5,250 students lost per year from 2023-24 through 2025-26), Mississippi would fall below 400,000 students by 2031.

The state is emptying from the inside out

Of the 140 districts with enrollment data in both 2015-16 and 2025-26, 125 lost students. Only 15 grew. That is an 89% decline rate among districts, a breadth of loss that cannot be explained by any single local factor.

Jackson Public School District accounts for the largest share: 11,051 students lost, a 39.4% decline that dropped enrollment from 28,019 to 16,968. That one district represents 17.6% of the statewide loss. The Jackson school board closed 13 schools in December 2023, citing the enrollment collapse alongside staff shortages and aging infrastructure.

But the concentration is less extreme than it might appear. The top 10 districts by absolute loss account for 36.4% of total district-level losses. The remaining 63.6% is distributed across 113 other declining districts, many of them small, rural, and Delta-based: Greenville (-1,860, or -34.8%), Sunflower County (-1,329, or -32.9%), Clarksdale (-1,030, or -36.6%).

DeSoto County stands as the most visible exception. The suburban Memphis spillover district grew by 1,375 students (+4.1%) over the decade, reaching 34,515. Oxford, home to the University of Mississippi, added 399 students (+9.4%). Together with a handful of small-town districts, they form a thin bright line across a map that is otherwise uniformly red.

Fewer children, fewer Mississippians

The enrollment decline mirrors a broader demographic crisis. Mississippi is one of just three states to lose population over the past decade, and the dynamics driving population loss are the same ones driving enrollment loss: outmigration and declining births.

Between 2010 and 2021, the number of Mississippi residents aged 5 to 19 declined by 6.6% due to families leaving the state and fewer children being born. The state's births fell from roughly 40,000 in 2010 to 35,000 in 2022, while deaths rose to match, according to demographic researchers at the University of Mississippi. For the first time, Mississippi is approaching natural decrease, where deaths outnumber births.

The Jackson metropolitan area is at the center of this exit. Census projections show Jackson experiencing the largest population decline among Mississippi's major cities, with a projected 5% decrease since 2020. Researchers at the University of Mississippi's Center for Population Studies point to a wage gap as a key driver: nearby metros like Nashville offer significantly higher salaries, pulling working-age residents out of the state.

Homeschooling has also pulled students from the public system. During the pandemic, Mississippi saw an 11.6 percentage point increase in the share of homeschooled students between May and September 2020, more than double the national average. While participation has declined from its pandemic peak, it remains elevated above pre-2020 levels.

The kindergarten signal

Kindergarten enrollment offers the clearest forward-looking indicator, and in Mississippi it points downward. The state enrolled 32,029 kindergartners in 2025-26, down 14.7% from 37,567 in 2015-16. The COVID-year trough of 30,356 in 2020-21 has only partially recovered; the kindergarten class has hovered between 32,000 and 33,600 for four years.

Every kindergartner who does not show up in 2026 is a first-grader who will not show up in 2027, a fifth-grader missing in 2031, and a twelfth-grader absent in 2038. The pipeline is not just narrower than it was a decade ago. It shows no sign of widening.

Both majority groups are shrinking

Mississippi's enrollment decline is not concentrated in one racial group. Black enrollment, the state's largest subgroup, fell from 238,935 (49.0% of total) in 2015-16 to 191,377 (45.1%) in 2025-26, a loss of 47,558 students or 19.9%. White enrollment declined from 217,897 (44.7%) to 171,982 (40.5%), a loss of 45,915 students or 21.1%.

The two groups that grew, Hispanic and multiracial, are still small in absolute terms but expanding rapidly. Hispanic enrollment nearly doubled from 16,141 to 29,512. However, this figure requires a significant caveat: Hispanic enrollment jumped 39.4% in a single year between 2023-24 and 2024-25 (from 21,225 to 29,582), a spike almost certainly driven by a classification or reporting change rather than actual arrivals of 8,357 new Hispanic students. Multiracial enrollment quadrupled from 5,884 to 24,573, with similar reclassification dynamics likely at play.

What the data cannot answer

The most important question is why 2025-26 produced a loss nearly six times larger than recent years. The data alone cannot distinguish between several plausible explanations. The September 2024 expiration of ESSER pandemic relief funding, which accounted for nearly 11% of Mississippi's education revenue, may have forced program cuts that pushed families to alternatives. Continued population outmigration is the most direct demographic explanation, consistent with national Census trends showing Mississippi among the nation's fastest-shrinking states.

The state's small but expanding school choice infrastructure is another factor. Mississippi's Education Scholarship Account program for students with special needs served roughly 345 students as of 2025, a number too small to explain the statewide loss. But per-pupil funding of approximately $8,000 follows each student who leaves, and the legislature has moved to clear the program's waitlist and potentially remove enrollment caps.

Ahead: the funding math

Mississippi distributes school funding through the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), a formula tied directly to enrollment. Every lost student means lost dollars. Mississippi First, an education policy organization, has warned that the consequences will fall hardest on "property-poor" districts that lack the local tax base to compensate for declining state allocations.

"The consequences of decreasing enrollment on school funding are grave and may have long-lasting effects on the quality of education that Mississippi's schools are able to provide, particularly for the students in the least-advantaged school districts." — Mississippi First

The 2025-26 loss of 10,725 students, at roughly $8,000 per pupil in MAEP funding, represents approximately $86 million in reduced state allocation. That is a one-year figure. The cumulative decade of decline has removed far more from the system, even as fixed costs for buildings, transportation routes, and administrative staff remain.

Every superintendent in the state is already planning for fewer students. The 2027 data will determine how fast. If the three-year trend holds, Mississippi drops below 400,000 public school students before the decade ends. The kindergarten pipeline, the population data, and the 2026 acceleration all point the same direction. Nothing in the numbers suggests a floor.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

43% Black: How St. Cloud Became Minnesota's Most Transformed District

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2006-07, St. Cloud^↗ enrolled 9,557 students. Nearly four out of five were white. Black students made up 12.1% of the district, a small minority in a city that had been overwhelmingly Scandinavian and German for generations.

By 2025-26, the numbers had inverted. Black students are now 43.0% of enrollment, the largest group in the district. White students have dropped to 33.8%. The total enrollment barely changed: 10,232 students, just 675 more than 20 years ago. But the composition of those classrooms is unrecognizable.

No mid-size district in Minnesota has undergone a transformation this fast. St. Cloud's Black enrollment share is 3.4 times the statewide average of 12.6%, and it exceeds Minneapolis, where Black students make up 26.8% of enrollment. The shift was driven overwhelmingly by one community: Somali refugees and their American-born children, who began arriving in Central Minnesota at the turn of the century and have reshaped the district's identity, its budget, and its politics.

The Crossover

The trend lines crossed in 2021, when Black enrollment share (41.4%) surpassed white enrollment share (40.5%) for the first time. That crossover was the culmination of two decades of steady, compounding change: Black enrollment grew from 1,161 students in 2006-07 to 4,399 in 2025-26, an increase of 279%. White enrollment fell from 7,545 to 3,462, a decline of 54.1%.

St. Cloud became majority-minority in 2018, when the white share dropped below 50% for the first time. It has fallen every year since. Meanwhile, the district's Hispanic population has grown 256%, from 347 students to 1,234, making Hispanic students 12.1% of enrollment in 2025-26, up from 3.6% in 2006-07.

The district's demographic profile now looks nothing like the state it sits in. Statewide, Minnesota's Black enrollment share crept from 9.1% to 12.6% over the same period. St. Cloud's share grew more than 30 percentage points. The gap between St. Cloud and the state average widened from 3 points in 2007 to more than 30 points by 2026.

Somali Resettlement and the Remaking of Central Minnesota

The mechanism behind St. Cloud's transformation is not ambiguous. Somali families began resettling in the St. Cloud area through federal refugee programs around 2000, drawn by resettlement agencies operating in the region, affordable housing, and meatpacking and manufacturing jobs. Secondary migration from initial placements in other states, particularly New York and Texas, amplified the flow.

By 2020, St. Cloud's city-wide Black population had reached nearly 15,000, up from approximately 1,700 in 2000. Nearly 4,400 St. Cloud residents claim Somali heritage. Statewide, approximately 107,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, the largest Somali community in the United States. Nearly 58% were born in the U.S.

The school enrollment data captures something the census underestimates. Because Somali families tend to be young, with 47.1% of Minnesota's Somali population under 17, their share of the school-age population far outpaces their share of the general population. The city's overall Black population is roughly 20% according to the 2020 Census; in the schools, it is 43%.

"I think the first thing people do when they get their citizenship is to vote." — Ahmed Abdi, journalist, on Somali civic engagement in St. Cloud, MPR News, Oct. 2024

The community's growing civic presence extends beyond the classroom. Multiple Somali-American candidates have run for city council and state legislative seats, and political scientist Matt Lindstrom has observed that two decades of settlement have given the community "more capital, both financial and social capital" to engage politically.

One in Four Students Is an English Learner

The demographic shift created a parallel operational challenge: language services. In 2025-26, 2,401 students in St. Cloud were classified as English learners, 23.5% of total enrollment. That is nearly double the statewide average. The EL population grew 66% from 1,444 in 2014, peaked at 2,466 in 2019, dipped during the pandemic years, and has now returned to its pre-COVID level.

The operational weight of that concentration falls on specific schools. PBS NewsHour reported that at Talahi Elementary, roughly 45% of students are Somali, and at Apollo High School, nearly a quarter of 1,400 students are Somali. Out of more than 700 teachers in the district, only one is Somali.

The district has responded with programmatic innovation. St. Cloud launched Minnesota's first Somali language immersion program for incoming kindergarteners. The dual immersion model splits the school day between Somali and English instruction across all subjects. Abdi Mahad, who created the elementary curriculum, has noted that many Somali-American students speak Somali at home but cannot read or write it.

"Research shows that kids who learn to first read and write their native language gain the skills to better acquire a second language." — Abdi Mahad, curriculum designer, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine

The Funding Gap Behind the Numbers

St. Cloud's transformation has not come with matching resources. The district ranks as Minnesota's least adequately funded, receiving approximately 66% of needed state support according to a 2023 MPR analysis. With 70% of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch and nearly 25% receiving special education services, the district's cost structure reflects a student body with intensive needs.

Special education enrollment has risen steadily, from 20.0% of the student body in 2014 to 24.9% in 2025-26. One in four St. Cloud students now receives special education services. (EL and special education populations overlap substantially; these figures should not be added together.) Finance director Amy Skaalerud has described the district's special education and English learner services as generating "large cross subsidies that are underfunded" at both state and federal levels.

In 2025, federal funding uncertainty compounded the pressure. The district was waiting on more than $1 million in federal grants, including $250,000 in Title III funds specifically earmarked for English learner support.

Growing, Not Shrinking

St. Cloud's demographic story is unusual in another respect: total enrollment has held steady and recently grown. Most Minnesota districts are shrinking. The state lost 20,028 students between 2020 and 2026. St. Cloud gained 61 over that span, and in the last two years it has surged: enrollment jumped from 9,286 in 2022-23 to 10,232 in 2025-26, an increase of 946 students. Board member Al Dahlgren told St. Cloud Live that in his 13 years on the board, he had not seen anything like the recent growth.

The growth is driven entirely by students of color. White enrollment fell by 68 students between 2022-23 and 2025-26. Black enrollment grew by 577, Hispanic by 376, and multiracial by 49.

District officials noted that over 400 students transferred in from charter schools or other districts in the most recent year.

No Comparable Peer

Among Minnesota's mid-size districts, no peer comes close to St. Cloud's demographic profile. Rochester, the state's third-largest district, has a Black enrollment share of 17.2%. Moorhead sits at 16.6%, Mankato at 14.5%, and Willmar at 14.2%. St. Cloud's 43.0% is in a category by itself.

Even Minneapolis, the state's largest and most diverse urban district, enrolls a smaller share of Black students at 26.8%. St. Cloud, a city of 69,000 an hour northwest of the Twin Cities, has a higher concentration of Black students than any other traditional school district in Minnesota.

The district's 2026-29 achievement plan reflects the stakes. Graduation rates for Black students stood at 65.4% in 2024. For Hispanic students, the rate was 43.8%. Third-grade reading proficiency for Black students was 43%, and for Hispanic students, 12.1%. The district has set a goal of 85% graduation rates for underrepresented groups by 2029.

The teacher gap

The question for St. Cloud is whether the infrastructure catches up to the students. The district has grown more diverse than any comparable community in Minnesota, but its teacher workforce remains 91.5% white. Federal funding for EL services is uncertain. Special education cross-subsidies are growing. And a community that has experienced documented tensions around demographic change is now at a point where the plurality group in the schools is the population that arrived most recently.

The 2026-27 kindergarten cohort will provide the next signal. If the recent pattern holds, with 1,000 students enrolling for the first time in the most recent year alone, St. Cloud's total enrollment will push toward levels not seen since the mid-2010s, even as it continues losing white students.

Meanwhile, at an elementary school in St. Cloud, a class of kindergarteners is learning to read and write in Somali before switching to English after lunch. The dual immersion program, the first of its kind in Minnesota, is built on a simple premise from curriculum designer Abdi Mahad: children who are literate in their home language learn a second language faster. It is the kind of program that only exists in a district where 43% of students are Black, where 2,401 are learning English, and where one Somali teacher serves a workforce of more than 700.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Michigan Lost 387,613 White Students in 29 Years

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Michigan's public schools enrolled 1,242,996 white students in 1995-96. By 2024-25, that number had fallen to 855,383, a loss of 387,613 children, or 31.2%. The state's total enrollment declined by 241,089 over the same period, 15.0%. White students did not merely participate in the decline. They drove more than all of it: the white loss exceeded the total loss by 146,524, meaning every other racial group combined grew even as the system contracted.

The result is a state where nearly one in three school districts now enrolls a majority of students of color, up from one in 16 just three decades ago. Michigan's schools are becoming more diverse not because diversity is growing fast, but because white enrollment is collapsing faster than anything else.

Where 387,613 students went

The scale of white enrollment loss in Michigan is difficult to overstate. White students made up 77.3% of enrollment in 1996. By 2025, that share had fallen to 62.6%, a drop of 14.7 percentage points. The decline has been relentless: white enrollment has fallen in every year with available data since 1999, with no single year of recovery across 20 measurements spanning 26 years.

The losses accelerated sharply after the late 1990s. From 1996 to 2002, white enrollment was essentially flat, averaging a gain of 676 students per year. After a gap in race-specific data from 2003 to 2008, the picture changed. From 2009 to 2014, white enrollment fell by an average of 20,621 per year. That pace moderated somewhat in recent years to roughly 16,100 per year from 2016 to 2025, but the COVID-19 pandemic produced a single-year loss of 36,813 white students in 2021, the largest on record.

The losses are not concentrated in any one corner of the state. Among districts with race data in both 2002 and 2025, Utica Community Schools^↗ lost 7,646 white students (28.4%), Warren Consolidated Schools^↗ lost 7,122 (51.9%), and Taylor School District^↗ lost 6,189 (71.0%). In Taylor, white enrollment fell from 8,720 to 2,531, leaving a district that was overwhelmingly white a generation ago with barely a quarter of its former white student body.

Growth running against the current

While white enrollment cratered, three groups grew substantially. Hispanic enrollment more than tripled, rising from 42,483 in 1996 to 129,236 in 2025, a gain of 86,753 students (204.2%). Multiracial enrollment, tracked since 2009, grew from 16,684 to 75,055, up 349.9%. Asian enrollment rose from 24,703 to 51,423, a gain of 108.2%.

Hispanic students now make up 9.5% of Michigan enrollment, up from 2.6% in 1996. Cesar Chavez Academy^↗ in Detroit is 94.2% Hispanic. Godfrey-Lee Public Schools^↗ in Wyoming, outside Grand Rapids, is 79.2%. West Ottawa Public School District^↗ near Holland added 908 Hispanic students between 2009 and 2025, a 43.1% increase. The growth extends well beyond traditional gateway communities: Ann Arbor Public Schools^↗ added 1,135 Hispanic students, Lake Orion Community Schools^↗ grew from 177 to 702 Hispanic students, and Jenison Public Schools^↗ from 96 to 567.

Multiracial students surpassed Asian students as Michigan's fourth-largest racial group in 2016 and now outnumber them by nearly 24,000. At 5.5% of enrollment, multiracial identification has grown faster than any other category, a pattern that reflects both demographic reality and evolving norms around how families identify their children.

Black enrollment presents a different trajectory. After peaking at 319,667 in 2002, Black enrollment fell to 246,009 by 2025, a loss of 73,658 students (23.0%). But the losses have effectively stopped: Black enrollment has fluctuated within a narrow band of 245,569 to 246,831 since 2022, the closest thing to a plateau in the data.

Birth rates, migration, and classification

Michigan's white enrollment decline is not primarily a story about families choosing private schools or homeschooling, though both play a role. The dominant driver is demographic: there are simply far fewer white children being born in the state.

Michigan had 127,537 births in 2006 but only 107,872 in 2019, 15% fewer. Those 2019 births became the kindergarten class of 2024-25. The state's fertility rate has been below the national average since the 1970s, and each generation after the baby boomers has produced progressively fewer children.

"The patterns of fertility boom and bust were kind of exaggerated for Michigan," with higher per-capita birth rates during the baby boom but "lower birthrates" since the 1970s. -- Michigan Public, April 2024, citing state demographer Alan Leach

Hispanic growth, by contrast, is fueled by both higher birth rates and continued migration. Michigan's Hispanic population grew more than 12% from the 2020 census count of 564,259, making it the state's fastest-growing demographic group. The growth is broad-based. Michigan's Hispanic population is roughly 69% of Mexican origin, concentrated in communities like Holland, Grand Rapids, and southwest Detroit, but increasingly dispersed across suburban districts statewide.

The multiracial surge likely reflects both genuine demographic change and shifting classification norms. The Census Bureau's two-or-more-races category grew 176% in Michigan between 2010 and 2020, far exceeding what intermarriage rates alone could produce. Some of this growth represents families who previously identified children under a single race now selecting multiple categories.

The Dearborn asterisk

One important caveat shapes how Michigan's race data should be read. Federal reporting standards classify Arab Americans as "white." In Dearborn City School District^↗, which reports 93.6% white enrollment, the student body is overwhelmingly Arab American. Federal reporting provides no way to distinguish Arab American students from white students. Census data from 2020 showed that people of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry make up 54.5% of Dearborn's total population, a figure experts believe undercounts the true proportion.

This means Michigan's white enrollment total includes a substantial community that does not identify as white in any cultural or practical sense. The true white enrollment decline is almost certainly steeper than the data shows, and the diversity of Michigan's schools is meaningfully understated.

The convergence

White enrollment and students-of-color enrollment are on converging paths. In 1996, white students outnumbered students of color by 878,696. By 2025, that gap had narrowed to 344,559.

The district-level picture is further along. In 1996, just 37 of 588 Michigan districts (6.3%) were majority-minority. By 2025, that number had reached 251 of 878 (28.6%). Thirty-two districts crossed from majority-white to majority-minority between 2016 and 2025 alone, including Troy School District^↗ (from 55.5% to 44.3% white), Farmington Public School District^↗ (55.7% to 46.3%), and Wayne-Westland Community School District^↗ (55.7% to 46.0%).

What shrinking and diversifying look like at once

The number of school buildings operated by traditional public school districts has dropped 12% since 2009-10, and more closures are likely. Each lost student represents roughly $9,608 in state per-pupil funding. The fiscal squeeze is real.

But the composition of who remains is shifting in ways that demand different investments. Districts designed, staffed, and programmed for overwhelmingly white student bodies now serve populations where Hispanic, multiracial, and Black students collectively make up more than a third of enrollment statewide, and a majority in 251 districts. The 2026-27 kindergarten cohort, born in 2021 during the pandemic-era birth trough, will arrive next fall. It will almost certainly be the most diverse class the state has ever enrolled, and one of the smallest. Those 251 districts now serve majority students of color with teaching staffs hired in a different era.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

In Turner-KC, a 43-Point Demographic Reversal

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Kansas 2025-26 Enrollment.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that statewide Hispanic enrollment grew in 20 of 21 years and that white enrollment fell every year without exception. Hispanic enrollment grew in 19 of 21 years (declining in 2021 and 2026), and white enrollment declined in 20 of 21 years (with a small uptick in 2014). The text has been corrected.

In 2005, two out of three students in Turner-Kansas City^↗ USD 202 were white. By 2026, fewer than one in four are. The 43.5 percentage-point collapse in white enrollment share is the largest in Kansas, more than double the statewide shift of 15.8 points over the same period.

Turner did not shrink during this transformation. Total enrollment held essentially steady at 3,695, just 109 students more than in 2005. What changed was not the number of students walking through the doors. It was who they were.

Where 1,533 white students went and 1,270 Hispanic students came from

The arithmetic is stark. Turner lost 1,533 white students between 2005 and 2026, a 63.9% decline. Hispanic enrollment nearly tripled, rising from 669 to 1,939, a gain of 1,270 students. Hispanic students now make up 52.5% of the district. Black enrollment held steady around 410-450 students, while multiracial students grew from 53 to 231.

The crossover happened in 2012. That year, white students fell below 50% for the first time, and Turner became a majority-minority district. The shift has only accelerated since: white share dropped another 25.8 percentage points in the 14 years that followed.

Turner is not an isolated case. It sits in Wyandotte County's rapidly diversifying corridor in the Kansas City metro, where the same forces are reshaping every school system, each on its own timeline.

The Wyandotte corridor: a transformation in stages

Neighboring Piper-Kansas City^↗ USD 203, just north of Turner in Wyandotte County, started the period even whiter, at 83.8%. Piper's white share has fallen 35.5 percentage points to 48.3%, crossing the majority-minority threshold in 2024, twelve years after Turner did. Piper, unlike Turner, has also grown substantially, more than doubling from 1,310 to 2,733 students over the period. The district approved a $64 million bond in 2022 in response to being the third fastest-growing district in Kansas, with students speaking more than 27 languages.

Bonner Springs^↗, also in Wyandotte County, dropped from 83.6% to 55.3% white, a 28.3 percentage-point shift. It has not yet crossed the majority-minority line, but at the current pace, it will within a few years.

Kansas City^↗ USD 500, the county's largest district and fifth-largest in the state, was already majority-minority in 2005 at 19.2% white. By 2026, white students account for just 7.3% of its 21,113 students. Hispanic enrollment has risen from 29.5% to 55.0%, and Hispanic students have surpassed Black students as the largest group, a reversal of the district's historical composition.

Turner leads the state, but the pattern is wider

Among districts with at least 500 students in 2005, Turner's 43.5 percentage-point white share drop is eight points larger than the next-closest district. The top 10 list includes suburban Kansas City districts like Haysville (-28.4 points), Spring Hill (-25.8 points), and Gardner Edgerton (-25.2 points), alongside meatpacking towns like Scott County (-30.3 points). The common thread is not one industry or one city. It is a statewide recomposition playing out at different speeds.

Eight Kansas districts crossed from majority-white to majority-minority between 2005 and 2026. Turner was the first and most complete crossing, but Piper, Lakin, Kismet-Plains, Hugoton, Coffeyville, Geary County, and Emporia have all followed. In 2005, eight Kansas districts with 100 or more students were majority-minority. By 2026, that number has risen to 18.

Statewide, white enrollment share has fallen from 75.8% to 60.0% over the period, while Hispanic share has doubled from 10.3% to 21.1%. Kansas has added 49,200 Hispanic students since 2005. The state lost 65,698 white students over the same period.

What is driving the shift in Turner

The most likely driver is the broader demographic transformation of Wyandotte County. Census estimates show that Wyandotte County's Hispanic population has grown from roughly 16% in 2000 to 34.1% in 2024, making Hispanic residents the county's second-largest group behind white residents at 36.4%. The county is already majority-minority, and its modest population growth of 1.7% since 2019 has been sustained largely by Hispanic residents.

The Kansas City metro area's Hispanic community has grown through a combination of migration from Latin America and secondary migration from other U.S. metros. KCUR reported in 2024 that Johnson County added nearly 16,000 Hispanic residents between 2010 and 2020 alone, outpacing white population growth. Unlike the meatpacking-driven Hispanic growth in southwestern Kansas towns like Dodge City and Liberal, the metro area's growth has been fueled by construction, agriculture, landscaping, and food service.

A competing explanation for part of the white share decline is residential sorting. As neighborhoods diversified, some white families may have enrolled children in private schools or moved to Johnson County suburbs. This is a common pattern nationally, though no Kansas-specific study has measured the magnitude. Turner's total enrollment stability, with only a modest 3% net gain over 21 years, is consistent with offsetting flows: new families arriving as others leave.

The funding question no one has answered

The demographic shift carries fiscal consequences. Kansas provides bilingual education funding through a weighting in the school finance formula: districts receive the greater of 0.395 times the full-time-equivalent count of students receiving ESOL services, or 0.185 times the headcount. A legislative task force was reviewing the adequacy of these weights as recently as mid-2025, reflecting growing concern that the formula has not kept pace with the scale of the need.

Turner's free and reduced-price lunch rate has climbed from 50.6% to 77.9% over the period, meaning the district is also navigating poverty-related instructional costs alongside language services. Federal Title III funding, which supports English learner instruction, was briefly withheld from Kansas districts in 2025. Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools alone stood to lose $854,864 in English learner and immigrant student funding.

"They will not have access to fair education." -- KCUR, July 2025, quoting a Shawnee Mission ESL teacher on the impact of federal funding freezes

The Shawnee Mission superintendent warned that the district would be forced to reallocate local funds to cover the gap, pulling resources from other programs. The federal funding was ultimately released, but the episode exposed how vulnerable bilingual programs remain to disruption, particularly in districts where the student population has changed faster than the staffing pipeline.

A preview of Kansas in 2040

Turner's transformation is not anomalous. It is an early indicator of what Kansas as a whole is becoming. Statewide Hispanic enrollment grew in 19 of the last 21 years, from 45,408 to 94,608, dipping only during COVID in 2021 and again slightly in 2026. White enrollment has fallen in 20 of 21 years, from 334,316 to 268,618, interrupted only by a brief uptick of 861 students in 2014. If the statewide trends of the past decade continue, white share will fall below 55% before 2035.

Turner's teaching staff remains overwhelmingly white and English-speaking, a legacy of the district it used to be. The bilingual weighting in the Kansas school finance formula was designed for a few dozen ELL students, not a district where a majority of families speak Spanish at home. Three-quarters of Turner's students now qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, up from half in 2005. The students walked through the doors. The adults on the other side are still catching up.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Colorado's Attendance Recovery Just Reversed. The State's 2028 Goal Is Now Unreachable.

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Colorado had recovered 50.8% of the gap between peak and pre-COVID chronic absenteeism levels. The correct figure is 55.8%. The article has been updated.

For two years, Colorado's chronic absenteeism numbers moved in the right direction. The rate fell 3.3 percentage points in 2022-23, then another 3.4 points in 2023-24, the kind of accelerating improvement that made a statewide goal of 15% by 2027-28 feel ambitious but not impossible.

Then the improvement stopped. In 2024-25, Colorado's chronic absenteeism rate rose to 28.5%, up 0.6 percentage points from the prior year. It was the first increase since the pandemic peak, and it added 4,005 students to the chronically absent population even as total enrollment declined by more than 7,000.

The reversal leaves Colorado 13.5 percentage points above its stated goal with three school years remaining to reach it. The math no longer works.

The recovery that wasn't

Colorado's chronic absenteeism trajectory tells a story in three acts. The rate rose from 22.6% in 2019-20 to a peak of 34.6% in 2021-22, when 317,796 students missed 10% or more of their school days. The recovery that followed was the fastest in the dataset: a 3.3 percentage point drop in 2022-23, accelerating to 3.4 points the following year.

By the end of 2023-24, the state had clawed back 55.8% of the gap between peak and pre-COVID levels. At that pace, Colorado would have reached 15% by 2029, still a year past its self-imposed deadline but within striking distance.

The 2024-25 reversal changed the calculus entirely. Instead of continuing at 3.4 points per year of improvement, the rate moved in the wrong direction.

The numbers behind the reversal

The reversal was not dramatic in percentage terms. A 0.6 point increase sounds manageable against a 12-point pandemic surge. But the context makes it alarming: it came after a pattern of accelerating improvement, and it hit during a year when 102 of 178 districts actually reduced their chronic absenteeism rates.

The statewide rate rose because a handful of large districts worsened enough to overwhelm the majority's progress. Colorado Springs D11^↗ alone added 3,955 chronically absent students with a 16.6 point spike. Denver^↗ added roughly 900 more. In a system where the ten largest districts account for approximately half of all chronically absent students, a few bad years in big places undo a lot of quiet progress elsewhere.

252,756 students and counting

Behind the percentages sits a population of 252,756 students who missed more than 10% of the 2024-25 school year. That number is 40,114 higher than the 2019-20 baseline of 212,642, which was itself a COVID-disrupted year where spring closures may have artificially suppressed absence counts.

The chronically absent population grew by 4,005 students in 2024-25 while total enrollment shrank by 7,018. The share of students showing up regularly is shrinking from both ends: fewer students enrolled, and more of those who remain are missing significant time.

Why the 2028 goal is unreachable

Colorado committed to cutting chronic absenteeism to 15% by 2027-28 as part of a national campaign. Even before the reversal, the timeline was aggressive. At the state's best sustained improvement pace of 3.4 percentage points per year, reaching 15% from the 2023-24 rate of 27.9% would have required four more years of unbroken progress, landing in 2028-29, one year past the deadline.

Now the starting point is worse. From 28.5%, the state would need to drop an average of 4.5 percentage points per year for three consecutive years, a pace it has never achieved. The fastest single-year improvement in the dataset was 3.4 points.

None of this means the goal was wrong. Setting ambitious targets can focus attention and resources. But the gap between aspiration and arithmetic has grown wide enough that honest conversation about timelines may be more productive than clinging to a number that the data no longer supports.

Colorado's graduation rate hit a decade high of 85.6% in 2024-25 with its dropout rate at a historic low of 1.6%, a reminder that chronic absenteeism and educational outcomes do not always move in lockstep. Students are graduating at record rates while also missing more school than at any point in recent history, a tension that defies simple narratives about attendance driving achievement.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Bakersfield Cut Chronic Absenteeism 33 Points -- California's Largest Turnaround

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2021-22, more than half of Bakersfield City School District^↗'s students were chronically absent. The rate hit 51.6% -- a number that means most classrooms could not count on seeing the same faces two days in a row. Three years later, the rate is 18.9%.

That 32.7-point drop is the largest chronic absenteeism improvement of any large district in California. It is not a statistical artifact of a tiny district where a few students moving changes the numbers. Bakersfield City enrolls 29,733 students across dozens of schools in Kern County. This is a genuine, large-scale turnaround.

More striking: Bakersfield's current rate of 18.9% is now below the state average of 19.4%. A district that was once 21.6 points worse than the state average is now half a point better.

The recovery timeline

Bakersfield's improvement was not gradual. It came in dramatic, front-loaded chunks.

From the 2022 peak to 2023: -21.2 percentage points. From 2023 to 2024: -6.9 points. From 2024 to 2025: -4.6 points. The initial improvement was massive, and while the pace has slowed -- as expected -- each successive year has still produced meaningful reductions.

The pre-COVID rate in Bakersfield was 11.7% in 2018-19. The current 18.9% is still 7.2 points above that baseline, so recovery is not complete. But the trajectory suggests continued improvement is plausible.

How Bakersfield compares

Among California districts with at least 5,000 students, Bakersfield's 32.7-point improvement from the COVID peak leads the state.

Modesto City Elementary is second at 29.7 points. Hanford Elementary improved 29.1 points. Hayward Unified dropped 26.5 points. The top improvers span the Central Valley, the Bay Area, and Southern California -- suggesting that the turnaround is not limited to one region or demographic profile.

What the top improvers share is harder to identify from data alone. Some, like Bakersfield and Santa Maria-Bonita, serve majority-Hispanic, high-poverty populations in agricultural regions. Others, like Cotati-Rohnert Park in Sonoma County, serve more mixed demographics. The common factor appears to be starting from catastrophically high peaks -- districts that hit 40-50% chronic rates during COVID had the most room to improve and, in some cases, the most urgency.

Bakersfield in context

Bakersfield City is an elementary district (K-8) serving the urban core of Bakersfield, the seat of Kern County. The district is majority Hispanic (roughly 80%) and high poverty. It does not include the surrounding suburban areas, which are served by separate districts like Panama-Buena Vista, Rosedale, and Greenfield.

The Kern County context matters because chronic absenteeism has a stronger correlation with poverty and housing instability than with school quality. Bakersfield's recovery suggests that community-level barriers can be overcome with sustained effort, even in a high-poverty district.

Kern County is also one of California's agricultural centers, with a significant migrant and seasonal worker population. School attendance in agricultural communities is historically difficult to maintain during harvest seasons, making Bakersfield's year-round improvement more notable.

The unanswered how

The data shows what happened but not how. Bakersfield City does not publish detailed descriptions of its attendance intervention strategies in a way that would allow direct attribution. The improvement could reflect systematic home visits, restart effects as schools returned to full in-person operations, community-level changes in employment and housing, improved data collection that inflated the 2022 peak, or some combination.

Without internal district reporting, the data cannot distinguish between districts that actively improved and districts that passively benefited from communities returning to pre-pandemic routines.

What the data does establish: a 30,000-student district in Kern County, majority-Hispanic, high-poverty, in an agricultural region where chronic absenteeism is supposed to be intractable, cut its rate by 33 points and landed below the state average. Somewhere in those schools on the south side of Bakersfield, something worked.

Data source

Analysis based on chronic absenteeism data from the California Department of Education DataQuest, school years 2016-17 through 2024-25. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of enrolled school days.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Phillip Brooks Takes the Helm at a School That Rewrote Its Own Name

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Phillip Brooks is the new principal of Johnson Abernathy Graetz High School in Montgomery, the second-largest school in Montgomery Public Schools^↗ and one that carries a name chosen to honor the civil rights movement that shaped the city.

"It is an honor to serve as principal of Johnson Abernathy Graetz High School and to lead a community with such a rich history and purpose," Brooks said in a statement released by the district. "My focus is on building strong relationships, creating a safe and supportive environment, and ensuring every student has access to the opportunities and resources they need to succeed."

Brooks succeeds Carlos Hammonds, who was appointed principal in July 2023 shortly after the school's renaming. MPS describes Brooks as a veteran educator with a background in school leadership, student support, and community engagement.

A school with a new identity

JAG High School operated as Jefferson Davis High School for more than 50 years before the Montgomery Public Schools board voted 5-2 in November 2022 to rename it. The school now honors three figures from Montgomery's civil rights history: Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge whose rulings helped dismantle segregation; Ralph Abernathy, the pastor and close associate of Martin Luther King Jr.; and Rev. Robert Graetz, the white Lutheran minister who supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott and whose home was bombed for it. The school unveiled its new mascot, the Jaguars, in July 2023.

The renaming placed a marker: this is a school that decided to reckon with its own history. Brooks will lead a campus of roughly 1,466 students where the work of defining what comes after that reckoning is still underway.

The district Brooks joins

Superintendent Dr. Zickeyous Byrd, who arrived in May 2025 from Selma City Schools, expressed confidence in the appointment.

"Johnson Abernathy Graetz High School carries a powerful legacy, and it is critical that we continue moving that legacy forward with strong, student-centered leadership," Byrd said. "Mr. Brooks is a relationship-driven leader who understands the importance of accountability, academic growth, and community connection. I am confident in his ability to lead JAG into its next chapter and deliver meaningful results for our students and families."

Montgomery Public Schools is navigating enrollment shifts that give that confidence particular weight. The district has posted 10 consecutive years of decline, falling from a peak of 31,082 students in 2016 to 24,911 in 2026, a loss of nearly 6,200 students.

JAG's own trajectory mirrors the district pattern. Enrollment fell from 1,933 in 2015 to a low of 1,427 in 2025 before ticking up slightly to 1,466 this year. That small rebound, during a year when the district as a whole lost another 580 students, is a data point worth watching.

The demographic composition of JAG's student body reflects the broader district. Montgomery Public Schools is roughly 76% Black, 14% Hispanic, and 8% white as of 2025. The district's English learner population has more than doubled since 2016, reaching 3,155 students, or about 12% of enrollment, a shift that touches staffing, curriculum, and the daily work of building a school culture.

What Brooks named first

In his statement, Brooks listed his priorities in a specific order: relationships, then safety, then access to resources. He closed with attendance and academic outcomes.

"Together, we will work to strengthen attendance, improve academic outcomes, and empower every student to reach their full potential," he said.

The attendance reference is not incidental. JAG earned a D grade from the Alabama State Department of Education in 2023-24, up from an F the prior year, a trajectory that suggests momentum even if the starting point is low. Brooks inherits a school that has shown it can move in the right direction.

Montgomery Public Schools is in a period of reinvention under Byrd's "Vision 2026" strategic plan, which includes converting two elementary schools into full magnet programs and establishing a workforce development center. Brooks will lead one of the district's largest campuses through that transition, in a school that already proved it is willing to change what it calls itself. The harder question, the one every new principal faces, is whether the work inside the building can match the ambition of the name on the outside.

Phillip Brooks did not respond to a separate request for comment. Rosanna Smith Brewton, MPS Director of Communications, provided the district's official statement on his behalf.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Data source

Data from the Alabama State Department of Education, accessed via the ALEdTribune data archive.

Alaska's Black Student Population Shrinks Nearly 20% in Six Years

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2020, 3,317 Black students were enrolled in Alaska's public schools. By 2026, that number had fallen to 2,669. The decline of 648 students, 19.5%, makes Black students the fastest-shrinking racial group in the state by a wide margin. Asian enrollment fell 16.2% over the same period. White enrollment, the largest category, dropped 3.1%.

The statewide enrollment decline was 2.5%. Black students lost ground at 7.7 times that rate.

What makes the pattern notable is where it is concentrated. Two districts, Anchorage^↗ and Fairbanks North Star^↗, account for roughly four out of every five Black students in Alaska's public school system. Both are home to major military installations. Both districts' Black enrollment fell sharply from 2020 to 2026, with only a brief uptick in 2022.

Two Districts, Four-Fifths of the Story

Anchorage enrolled 2,179 Black students in 2020. By 2026 that count had fallen to 1,782, a loss of 397 students, or 18.2%. Fairbanks, home to Fort Wainwright and nearby Eielson Air Force Base, lost at an even steeper rate: 538 Black students in 2020, 331 in 2026, a 38.5% decline.

Together, the two districts accounted for 81.9% of Alaska's Black enrollment in 2020 and 79.2% in 2026. Their combined loss of 604 Black students represents 93.2% of the statewide decline. The rest of Alaska's 50-plus districts collectively lost 44 Black students over six years.

Fairbanks presents the sharper picture. Fort Wainwright alone serves roughly 5,900 soldiers and 9,000 family members, and nearby Eielson Air Force Base adds thousands more. Black students' share of Fairbanks district enrollment fell from 4.1% in 2020 to 3.0% in 2026. Rotation cycles for military families typically run two to three years, meaning the district's student body is partly a function of which units happen to be stationed there in any given year.

The Parallel Asian Decline

Black students are not alone in this trajectory. Asian enrollment fell from 7,267 to 6,087 over the same period, a loss of 1,180 students (16.2%). When indexed to 2020, the two groups trace nearly identical downward paths.

Anchorage accounts for the bulk of the Asian decline as well: the district's Asian enrollment fell from 4,792 to 3,956, a loss of 836 students (17.4%). In a state where military, federal civilian, and contractor positions drive much of the non-Native workforce, the shared trajectory of Black and Asian enrollment suggests a common structural force: the rotation and attrition of federally connected families rather than dynamics specific to any single racial community.

The two groups diverge in scale. Asian students still number 6,087 statewide, more than twice the Black count. But both are shrinking faster than every other group.

Everyone Lost, Almost No One Gained

Alaska's racial composition is not simply getting whiter. White enrollment dropped by 1,880 students (3.1%). Native American enrollment, the state's second-largest group at 21% of students, fell 4.9%, a loss of 1,353 students. Hispanic enrollment is essentially flat, gaining 22 students over six years.

Only two groups grew: Pacific Islander students, up 4.6% (186 students), and multiracial students, up 7.3% (1,170 students). Multiracial is now the state's third-largest racial category at 13.7% of enrollment, up from 12.4% in 2020. Part of that growth may reflect reclassification as families increasingly identify children as belonging to more than one race rather than a single category.

Black students' share of enrollment fell from 2.6% to 2.1%. At this rate, they will fall below 2% within two years.

The Outmigration Engine

Alaska has experienced 12 consecutive years of net outmigration, with more people leaving the state than arriving every year since 2012. In 2023-24 alone, 1,163 more people left than moved in. The state's overall population has grown slightly only because births exceed deaths.

But the enrollment data suggests this outmigration is not evenly distributed across racial groups. If Black and Asian families are leaving at three to four times the rate implied by overall population trends, the most likely explanation involves the federal workforce. Active-duty military, civilian Department of Defense employees, and defense contractors are disproportionately represented among Black and Asian Alaskans compared to their share of the general population. When those positions rotate or contract, the enrollment impact is immediate and concentrated.

The fiscal environment may accelerate the pattern. Anchorage is closing three elementary schools, Fire Lake, Lake Otis, and Campbell STEM, after the 2025-26 school year and cutting more than 500 staff positions to address a $90 million budget deficit. Enrollment has dropped by approximately 5,000 students since the district's recent peak. The district's chief financial officer, Andy Ratliff, described the outlook in blunt terms: "Not a very uplifting picture at this point."

Across the state, the budget pressures are widespread. Nearly 80% of Alaska school districts face deficits, and one parent told state lawmakers: "You need to raise the base student allocation, or else you'll force me and every parent like me... to move away."

What the Data Cannot Show

A methodological note: Alaska's 2020 race/ethnicity counts sum to 0.3% more than total enrollment, a minor discrepancy likely due to rounding or reporting timing. From 2021 onward, race sums match totals exactly. All share calculations in this analysis use the race sum as the denominator to ensure consistent comparisons across years.

The enrollment figures do not distinguish between families who left Alaska entirely and those who moved to private, charter, or home-school options within the state. They also cannot separate military PCS (permanent change of station) rotations from families who chose to leave for economic or quality-of-life reasons.

What the data does show is an unbroken six-year trend, consistent across both military-connected districts, and concentrated in the same two racial groups most likely to be represented in federally connected employment. The trend held through COVID recovery, through Eielson's F-35 expansion that brought roughly 3,300 people, and through modest statewide population growth. The F-35 buildup may have partially offset what would otherwise be an even steeper Fairbanks decline, but it was not enough to reverse the direction.

The question for Anchorage and Fairbanks is whether the loss of Black and Asian students is a temporary artifact of military rotation schedules or a structural feature of a state where the cost of living, school budget cuts, and limited economic diversification are pushing federally connected families toward assignments elsewhere. If the next round of PCS orders does not bring replacements at the same rate, Alaska's already-small Black student population will continue to contract toward a statistical footnote.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

150,000 Fewer White Students in 19 Years

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Wisconsin lost 67,640 public school students between 2006 and 2025. White students alone lost 150,475.

That arithmetic only works one way: non-white enrollment collectively grew by 82,835 students over the same period, more than absorbing Black and Native American declines. Hispanic enrollment nearly doubled. Multiracial enrollment more than tripled. But none of it was enough to offset the collapse in white enrollment, which fell 22.1% while overall enrollment dropped just 8.0%. White students went from 77.9% of the student body to 65.8%, shedding 12.1 percentage points of share in 19 years.

The loss is not slowing down. Over the past five years, Wisconsin has lost an average of 11,689 white students annually, nearly double the 6,391-per-year pace of 2007-2012. Every single observed year in the 19-year dataset recorded a decline. There has not been one year of growth.

A state that adds residents but loses students

The paradox of Wisconsin's enrollment crisis is that the state's total population has been growing. Net migration reached its highest level in 20 years in 2023, with 19,000 new residents arriving. But the people arriving are not the people having children, and the people having children are having fewer of them.

Wisconsin's birth rate has fallen by nearly 22% over the past three decades. In 2024, just 59,675 babies were born in the state, the lowest number since before World War II and an 18% decline from the 2007 peak. Milwaukee alone recorded 7,386 births in 2024, a 22% drop since 2019. In 29 of the state's 46 rural counties, deaths now outnumber births.

The birth rate decline has been steepest among white families, mirroring national patterns. Wisconsin has remained below replacement-level fertility since 1974, and the Applied Population Laboratory at UW-Madison projects total public school enrollment will fall an additional 6.2% to 7.7% in just the next five years, with a 13% to 15% decline projected over the next decade.

Who is replacing whom

The white enrollment decline is not happening in isolation. It is one half of a demographic transformation.

Hispanic enrollment rose from 58,939 (6.7%) to 116,817 (14.5%), a 98.2% increase. Hispanic students are now the second-largest demographic group in Wisconsin schools, having surpassed Black students, whose enrollment fell 22.6% from 91,073 to 70,514. Multiracial students, tracked only since 2011, surged 240.7% from 13,197 to 44,968, now comprising 5.6% of enrollment. Asian students grew 12.8%.

The net effect: non-white students added 82,835 seats while white students vacated 150,475. The gap between those two figures, 67,640, is the state's total enrollment decline.

The acceleration

The year-over-year data tells a story of acceleration. In the early period of 2007-2012, white enrollment fell by an average of 6,391 students per year. By 2021-2025, that average had climbed to 11,689, an 83% increase in the annual rate of loss.

The COVID year of 2020-21 produced the single largest one-year white enrollment drop: 21,170 students vanished from public school rolls. The white student body shrank 3.6% in a single year. Before and after COVID, the trajectory was already pointed sharply downward, but the pandemic appears to have permanently removed a cohort of white families who chose private schools, homeschooling, or left the state and never returned.

The state's four private school choice programs enrolled 60,972 students in 2025-26, with nearly $700 million in annual state funding flowing to voucher schools. About 46% of all Wisconsin private school students now receive a taxpayer-funded voucher. While the voucher programs serve students of all backgrounds, the growth of private alternatives provides one channel through which families can leave public schools without leaving the state.

14 districts crossed below majority-white

The geographic story of white enrollment decline plays out at every scale.

Milwaukee^↗ lost 9,402 white students, a 62.3% decline from 15,087 to 5,685. White students now make up just 8.7% of MPS enrollment. Kenosha^↗ lost 6,606 white students (-45.2%) and crossed below 50% white, falling from 66.1% to 43.8%. Waukesha^↗, the suburban anchor west of Milwaukee, lost 4,465 (-40.6%). Madison Metropolitan^↗ lost 3,882 and is now just 39.1% white, down from 56.1%.

In total, 14 districts that were majority-white in 2006 crossed below 50% by 2025. The most striking transformations occurred in small agricultural communities. Arcadia^↗ went from 89.7% white to 20.0%, a 69.8-percentage-point shift driven by Hispanic growth tied to meatpacking and agricultural employment. Abbotsford^↗ dropped from 84.2% to 28.3%. Independence^↗ fell from 91.5% to 42.4%.

These are not large districts. Arcadia enrolls about 1,600 students. But the scale of demographic change, from nine in ten students being white to one in five within 19 years, is among the fastest documented shifts in the Upper Midwest.

Among larger districts that crossed the threshold, Sheboygan Area^↗ (9,285 students) fell from 66.3% to 44.2% white. Beloit^↗ went from 50.4% to 29.9%. Cudahy^↗ went from 78.0% to 49.0%.

A structural shift, not a crisis

"My hope is that with working with the Legislature, the executive branch and the business community, we can come up with ways to help Wisconsin address the demographic challenge." -- UW System President Jay Rothman, Daily Cardinal, Jan. 2025

Rothman was speaking about the university system's own enrollment pressures, but the same force, fewer young people born to an aging white population, is the primary driver in K-12. The state's population is projected to decline by nearly 200,000 residents by 2050 absent a sustained increase in immigration.

The distinction matters because the white enrollment decline is not primarily driven by families fleeing public schools, although school choice programs have grown substantially. It is primarily a birth cohort story: there are simply fewer white children being born in Wisconsin each year. Only 6.8% of the state's population growth in 2024 came from natural increase (births minus deaths); the remaining 93% came from migration.

The multiracial enrollment surge of 240.7% since 2011 also complicates the narrative. Some portion of the white enrollment decline may reflect reclassification rather than population loss. Families that previously identified children as white may now identify them as multiracial. The 240.7% surge in multiracial enrollment since 2011 is consistent with both genuine demographic change and a shift in how families fill out enrollment forms.

What to watch next

At the current rate of share decline, 0.65 percentage points per year, white students would drop below 50% of Wisconsin's public school enrollment around 2049. That projection assumes linear continuation of recent trends, which is uncertain in either direction: accelerating birth rate declines could move the crossover earlier, while immigration-driven population growth depends on federal policy.

The more immediate question is fiscal. 68 of 72 Wisconsin counties saw public school enrollment decline in the latest data. Revenue limits have been functionally frozen for 18 consecutive years. Districts passed a record 148 operating referendum questions in 2024, authorizing $4.4 billion in new funding as local taxpayers fill the gap that declining enrollment and flat state aid leave behind.

The demographic composition of Wisconsin's classrooms has changed more in 19 years than it did in the previous half-century. Whether the institutions that serve those classrooms have changed alongside them is a question the enrollment numbers alone cannot answer.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Washington's Chronic Absenteeism Recovery Has Stalled

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The number arrived at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction like a wall: 27.1%. After dropping three full percentage points the year before, Washington's chronic absenteeism rate in 2024-25 barely moved. The improvement was two-tenths of a point. Rounded generously, it still rounds to 27%.

That near-zero progress leaves 296,544 students — more than one in four across the state — missing 18 or more school days per year. It means the attendance crisis that exploded during COVID has, for all practical purposes, stopped getting better.

Three years of progress, then a wall

Before the pandemic, chronic absenteeism in Washington held remarkably steady. From 2015 through 2019, the rate hovered between 14.5% and 15.2%, never moving more than four-tenths of a point in any direction. Then came COVID. The rate spiked to 32.8% in 2021-22, more than doubling the pre-pandemic baseline, as remote learning habits, family disruptions, and disconnection from school took hold.

The recovery that followed was real but incomplete. The rate dropped 2.5 points in 2022-23, then 3.0 points in 2023-24. Those were meaningful gains, the kind that generated cautious optimism at OSPI and in district offices statewide. But the 0.2-point improvement in 2024-25 suggests Washington has hit a recovery ceiling.

The state has recovered 5.7 of the 17.7 percentage points it lost during the pandemic — 32.2% of the way back to normal. At the average pace of improvement over the past three years (roughly 1.9 points per year), Washington would not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2031. At the 2025 pace, the math stops making sense entirely.

OSPI's target: missed by two points

Washington joined the nationwide 5-Year Attendance Challenge with an ambitious goal: cut chronic absenteeism from 27% to 14% by 2029. The intermediate target for 2024-25 was 25.0%. The actual rate of 27.1% missed that mark by 2.1 points, a gap that will compound if the stall continues.

Hitting 14% by 2029 would require cutting the rate by roughly 3.3 points per year for the next four years — a pace Washington has never achieved, even in its best recovery year. The state is not on track, and the deceleration in 2025 makes the challenge substantially harder.

Who bears the burden

The statewide average masks dramatic variation by student group. Homeless students are chronically absent at 51.1%, a rate that has barely improved from the 59.7% peak. Native American students face a 45.6% chronic rate, nearly double the state average. Foster care youth are stuck at 41.3%, a number that has not meaningfully changed in three years.

Low-income students miss school at 35.4%, compared to 19.0% for their non-low-income peers. Hispanic students are chronically absent at 33.1%, Black students at 29.2%, and students with disabilities at 34.3%. Only Asian students, at 16.8%, are anywhere near the pre-pandemic baseline.

The pattern is consistent: every equity gap that existed before COVID is wider now, and the groups with the highest rates are recovering the slowest. The pandemic did not create these disparities, but it stretched them to a degree that three years of recovery has not been able to compress.

What the legislature is doing about it

Senate Bill 5007, a bipartisan proposal currently moving through the state legislature, would allocate $20.4 million per biennium to address chronic absenteeism in high schools specifically. The bill would fund school-based absenteeism teams, data systems to identify at-risk students earlier, and community grants for organizations working on attendance barriers like housing instability and transportation.

The focus on high schools is deliberate. Elementary schools have recovered nearly half their COVID attendance losses, but high school chronic rates remain within two points of their pandemic peak. Grade 12 students are chronically absent at 37.5%, virtually unchanged from the 38.7% high-water mark.

The easy recoveries are done

The stall in 2025 raises an uncomfortable possibility: the students who were going to return to regular attendance already have. What remains is structural. The families dealing with housing instability, the teenagers who found jobs during remote learning and never came back full-time, the students with chronic health conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. These are not problems that an attendance letter or a phone call home will solve.

Senate Bill 5007 would put $20.4 million toward the high school piece of this puzzle. But at 296,544 students, the scope of the problem dwarfs any single intervention. Three years of recovery bought Washington a 5.7-point improvement. The next 12 points will be harder.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Virginia Publishes 2024-25 Enrollment Data

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Virginia 2024-25 Enrollment.

Virginia's public schools enrolled 1,261,501 students in fall 2024, according to the latest Fall Membership data from VDOE. That is 608 fewer than the year before, 36,511 below the 2019-20 peak of 1,298,012, and the third decline in four years.

The 2022-23 recovery of 11,478 students now looks like a one-year bounce, not the start of a return to normal. Only 19.3% of the pandemic loss has been recovered. The forces pulling students out of Virginia's public schools, declining births, surging homeschool enrollment, and a growing private school sector, are structural, not cyclical. The floor keeps moving.

What the numbers open up

The enrollment data covers 131 divisions across the Commonwealth. Over the coming weeks, The VAEdTribune will unpack it in a series of data-driven articles. Here is what jumps out first.

Virginia's white majority ended a decade ago. White students dropped below 50% of enrollment in 2013-14 and now comprise 43.4% of the student body, a loss of 106,226 students since 2010-11. Hispanic enrollment just crossed 20% for the first time, and the gap between Hispanic and Black students has narrowed from 105,000 to fewer than 15,000.

Norfolk^↗ has lost students every year for 22 years. No other division comes close. Norfolk enrolled 36,745 students in 2003 and 26,832 in 2024-25, a 27% decline that has forced the school board to vote to close nine schools. Meanwhile, 43 divisions across the state are at all-time-low enrollment.

Fairfax County^↗ lost 8,371 students while its population grew. The state's largest division is shrinking even as its school-age population expands. The non-public enrollment rate in Fairfax nearly doubled from 8.6% to 17.4%, a signal that families with means are choosing alternatives at a pace that outstrips any demographic explanation.

By the numbers: 1,261,501 students statewide in 2024-25 — still 36,511 below the pre-pandemic peak, a 19.3% recovery rate, with three of the last four years in decline and 73% of divisions still below their 2019-20 levels.

The threads we are following

Hampton Roads has lost 30,000 students. The Hampton Roads metro, anchored by Virginia Beach^↗ and Norfolk, has shed students for two decades. Virginia Beach alone is down 15% from peak. The region's military-dependent economy and aging housing stock are accelerating the decline faster than most of Virginia.

The kindergarten pipeline is breaking. Virginia now enrolls more 12th graders than kindergartners, and has for eight consecutive years. The K-to-G12 ratio hit 86.6 in 2024-25. Kindergarten peaked at 96,935 in 2012-13 and has since fallen 13%. The elementary school squeeze that began a decade ago is now arriving at the secondary level.

One in seven Virginia students is an English learner. LEP enrollment grew 8.5% in just two years, reaching 187,586 in 2024-25. Two divisions, Manassas City and Manassas Park, are now majority-LEP. The demand for bilingual teachers and ESOL programs is growing faster than most division budgets can accommodate.

What comes next

This is the first in a series of articles examining what the 2024-25 enrollment data reveals about Virginia public schools. New articles publish weekly on Tuesdays.

The enrollment figures come from the VDOE Fall Membership data. The data covers certified headcount enrollment for public school divisions statewide.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

The Race Gap Between Nevada's Two School Systems Just Closed

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Nevada's traditional public school districts have lost 53,160 students since 2019, an 11.7% decline. Over that same span, the charter sector gained 28,201. The charter gains did not replace what traditional districts lost. They absorbed roughly half of it, leaving a net hole of 24,959 students in the state's public education system. The distinction matters: Nevada is not simply shuffling students between sectors. It is losing students from the system entirely while simultaneously redistributing the ones who remain.

The charter sector's share of total enrollment has nearly doubled, from 8.5% in 2018-19 to 14.9% in 2025-26. The number of charter entities grew from 29 to 51. At current per-pupil funding of $9,051, the 28,201 students now enrolled in charters instead of traditional schools represent roughly $255 million in annual per-pupil funding that shifted between sectors.

The divergence accelerated in 2026

Indexed to 2019, charter enrollment stands at 167% of its starting point. Traditional enrollment stands at 88%. The gap between the two lines widened sharply in 2025-26, when traditional districts lost 16,176 students and charters gained 6,925.

The 2026 numbers deserve a caveat. In January 2025, Clark County School District^↗ transferred oversight of six charter schools it had been operating to the State Public Charter School Authority. Those six schools, including Odyssey Charter School, The Delta Academy, Innovations International, Explore Knowledge Academy, and Rainbow Dreams, brought approximately 5,135 students into the SPCSA's enrollment count. They had previously been counted under Clark County's traditional total. Of the charter sector's reported 6,925-student gain in 2026, 5,135 came from this administrative reclassification. Organic growth across existing charters was closer to 1,790.

The transfer also inflated Clark County's reported loss. Clark's stated decline of 14,451 students in 2026 includes roughly 4,694 students who did not leave the district. They continued attending the same schools under a different authorizer. The adjusted loss, closer to 9,757, is still the largest single-year drop outside the pandemic year.

Even after stripping out the transfer effect, the seven-year trend is unmistakable. Between 2019 and 2025, before the transfer distorted the numbers, charters gained 21,276 students organically (50.3%) while traditional districts lost 36,984 (-8.1%).

Clark County bore 82% of the damage

Clark County accounts for 43,746 of the 53,160 students lost from the traditional sector since 2019, or 82.3%. The district's enrollment has fallen from 335,333 to 291,587, a 13.0% decline.

The fiscal consequences have arrived. Clark County will have $50 million less to fund schools in 2026-27. Of its 375 schools, 284 face budget reductions. A district memo outlined 1,246 positions slated for surplus: 682 licensed teachers, 500 support staff, and 64 administrators.

"I've talked to people at elementary schools where now they're assuming that there's going to be 39 kids in a fifth-grade class." -- Rebecca Dirks Garcia, Nevada PTA president-elect, News 3 Las Vegas

The kindergarten pipeline signals more losses ahead. Clark County's current kindergarten cohort is 17,678 students, nearly 30% smaller than its senior class of 24,505. Every year, the district graduates a larger cohort than the one entering.

Washoe County School District^↗ lost 3,935 students over the same period (-5.8%), a smaller share of the statewide total but a steady erosion. No other traditional district lost more than 1,111 (Douglas County, -19.0%).

A handful of networks drove charter growth

Charter growth was not evenly distributed. Two networks, Pinecrest Academy of Nevada (+4,052, +91.6%) and Mater Academy of Nevada (+3,335, +170.0%), together account for more than a quarter of the sector's total gain. Coral Academy of Science Las Vegas (+1,870) and Legacy Traditional School (+1,632) round out the top four.

Somerset Academy of Las Vegas remains the single largest charter entity at 9,534 students, but its growth has been modest: just 908 students added, a 10.5% increase. The sector's expansion is being driven less by the established players scaling up and more by mid-size networks doubling or tripling in size.

Nevada's legislature has actively encouraged this expansion. Assembly Bill 400, signed in 2023, granted cities and counties the ability to sponsor charter schools. Henderson and North Las Vegas both won approval as charter authorizers in 2024, opening a new pathway for charter growth outside the SPCSA system. The state has also committed $31 million for charter transportation since 2023 and $38 million for charter teacher pay increases in 2025, reducing two of the sector's historical cost disadvantages.

The demographic gap between sectors has vanished

In 2019, Nevada's charter schools skewed notably whiter than traditional districts: 40.1% white versus 30.9%, a 9.2 percentage-point gap that critics pointed to as evidence the sector served a different population.

By 2025-26, the gap has functionally closed. Charter schools are 25.1% white; traditional districts are 26.1%. The charter sector is now slightly less white than the traditional sector. Hispanic enrollment in charters has risen from 31.4% to 42.5%, approaching the traditional sector's 46.5%.

Two forces drove the convergence. Newer charters opened in more diverse neighborhoods and enrolled more Hispanic students as they expanded. At the same time, traditional districts lost white students faster than they lost students overall, concentrating the remaining enrollment among students of color.

Chris Daly of the Nevada State Education Association told The Nevada Independent that "charter schools love to compare themselves and never correct for demographic differences." The enrollment data suggests the comparison is becoming more apples-to-apples on race, though gaps persist in other dimensions. The same Nevada Independent analysis found that 86% of traditional public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, compared to 64% in charter schools. Charter students are also less likely to be English learners or to receive special education services.

One in seven, and climbing

One in seven Nevada public school students now attends a charter school. The share has risen every year since the data begins, from 8.5% in 2019 to 14.9% in 2026. At 2019-2025 growth rates, charters would hit one in five students by 2030.

Nevada's traditional districts are funding infrastructure built for 456,000 students while serving 403,000. Each departing student takes $9,051 in state per-pupil funding but leaves behind a building, a bus route, and a share of fixed administrative costs that do not shrink proportionally. The $50 million budget gap Clark County faces next year is the arithmetic of that mismatch playing out in real time.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.